What BravoCon reveals about NBCUniversal’s partnership strategy
Superfan event leverages social pull and cross-media placement to draw marketers.
ShanonG
From Friday to Sunday, NBCUniversal’s massive superfan event celebrating its popular unscripted franchises, such as “The Real Housewives,” “Below Deck,” “Project Runway” and more, took place at New York’s Javits Center. BravoCon’s second edition, following a two-year hiatus due to COVID restrictions, drew approximately 30,000 attendees, with tickets, some costing as much as $2,000, selling out within 3 minutes, according to sources at NBCUniversal.
The event brought together what Laura Molen, the company's president of advertising sales and partnerships, called “affluencers,” or audiences that are both wealthy and wield influence online and within the fan community. Those are the consumers that BravoCon’s 19 brand sponsors, including Bud Light Seltzer, State Farm and Lay’s, hoped to nab face time with over the weekend.
“When we look at our most importantly Lay’s buyers, there's an over-index” with viewers of reality and women-centric TV, which was a prime driver of the brand’s participation in BravoCon, said Stacy Taffet, senior VP of brand marketing for PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay. “The fragmentation of how we can reach consumers, the fragmentation of the media landscape and the way communities are forming now given all the movement in social media, there's big, mass communities in niche fan areas.” Lays also sponsored the event in 2019.
At BravoCon, an immense warehouse-like space populated with vendor booths, meet-and-greets, bars, photo backdrops and even a hair salon, Lay’s bid to Bravo fanatics took the form of a yellow and metallic gold tasting room called “The Real Housewives of Lay’s.” Packed into the small area was a glittery step-and-repeat, displays of popular quotes from “The Real Housewives” franchise (some with Lay’s twists, like New York Housewife Dorinda Medley's “Clip, clip, clip” transformed into “Chip, chip chip”) and a counter with themed potato creations.
Three culinary creations coordinated with three “Housewives” favorites: Beverly Hills’ Kyle Richards’ was a swirl of sweet and garlic potato on top of a Lay’s chip, the contrasting flavors an ode to her propensity for doing the splits at parties; a callback to New Jersey’s Melissa Gorga’s feud with co-star and sister-in-law Teresa Giudice, chocolate-dipped sprinkle cookies with Lay’s baked in were reminiscent of cookies trashed on the show; lastly, Dorinda Medley’s lasagna creation, sausage between two chips, paid homage to, well, her love of lasagna.
The recipes and space presented Bravo IP alongside Lay’s branding in a marketing stunt that had fans literally rushing menu signage and enthusing over the opportunity to try Gorga’s cookies at the pop-up on Friday afternoon.
Beyond the BravoCon activation, Lay’s integrated into Bravo contact across its linear linear channel and BravoCon digital content on NBCU’s streamer Peacock. In addition, the participating “Housewives” shared content on social media to further promote the partnership. As of writing, posts from Richards, Medley and Gorga had more than 10,000 likes combined on Instagram in addition to fans sharing from the event itself.
BravoCon is a unique opportunity for Lay’s through both its consumer alignment and media extensions, said Taffet, but also represents a broader shift in the brand’s strategy toward “surround the fan” experiences, particularly as fandom becomes an ever-growing cultural force accessible through in-person events experiencing a post-pandemic surge. Taffet expressed a similar reason for a culinary activation at Coachella earlier this year.
BravoCon packages were part of NBCU’s pre-upfront selling, Molen said, where the company “got our presenting sponsors early on, locked them in” and then centered Bravo in its upfront presentation so that other convention sponsorships could fall into place in the months leading up to the event.
State Farm's area, called "The Bravohood," was constructed to resemble a little neighborhood of house-like sitting areas themed for shows like "Below Deck." And Bud Light Seltzer sponsored the "BravoCon After Dark" party.
As NBCU continues to expand the utility of its One Platform partnership product, BravoCon has become a testing ground for its commerce and cross-portfolio branding capabilities. Extensions such as Bravo overlord Andy Cohen appearing on the “Today” show for the launch of BravoCon and Jamie Lee Curtis promoting Universal’s “Halloween Ends” on a reunion episode of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” represent NBCU's efforts to cross-pollinate its audience en masse as marketers seek to leverage entertainment companies' full portfolios.
“In the old days, you tried to find 50 million people at one time with one singular message,” said Frito-Lay's Taffet. “That's hard to do now because people are finding pockets of these fan communities—and they're not small.”
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