Abstract
Vice-President of global marketing at Reebok, Micky Pant, implemented a renewal of Reebok branding strategy, especially by developing new media concepts. He was the coordinator of several marketing campaigns, such as the tremendous "Terry Tate, Office linebacker" TV ads, presented in 2003 during Super Bowl breaks. During Micky Pant's tenure as vice president, the athletic footwear company developed novel ways of promoting its brand. The famous Terry Tate TV spot is now considered as one of the first innovative advertisement campaigns using TV has a "hook" and the Internet as a propagation tool. Indeed, at this time, "Viral Marketing" and "Buzz" were only theory concepts, and were not as well understood as today. The annual event Super Bowl is considered to be a premier sport event in the United States. It is also known to have the largest audience on TV of the year. As a consequence, TV channels sell advertising slots at very expensive prices, and advertising campaigns have the reputation of being particularly innovative and funny. People often take a lot of pleasure from these ads. In 2003, Reebok bought a 60 seconds advertising time during the break and broadcasted its campaign "Terry Tate : office linebacker" for first time. This TV spot shows a documentary-like video, occurring in an open-space office. The video is focused on the company's manager who is arguing about his new motivation strategy. This strategy is based on hiring a football linebacker, who loves to tackle and offend people who do not respect office life (does not make coffee when the cup is empty, attend personal phone calls, or play computer game during working time). This spot appears to be particularly surprising, as it is humorous, such as confronting the boring office life and extremely funny sports culture. After viewing this spot on TV, millions of American people rushed to their PC and downloaded Terry Tate's clips. 20 million files downloaded on the first week-end, and on Monday Reebok servers broadcasted several terabits of data in a few seconds.
