The history of NFL broadcast promotion is largely a history of disposable enthusiasm: characters appear, shout about football, and vanish into the same void that claims most September advertising. Fox, it seems, has decided to buck that particular tradition.
For the first time, the network is bringing back characters from a previous season's promotional campaign — a move that suggests either genuine affection for its creations or, perhaps more likely, the discovery that building audience familiarity is cheaper than starting from scratch each autumn.
The characters in question — Barb, Cornell, and Gerry, who sound like they might work in adjacent cubicles at a regional insurance company — were introduced last year in a campaign built around the conceit that ordinary people could absorb football wisdom from Tom Brady's "seven-ring football brain." (The anatomical specifics of this brain were left, mercifully, unexplored.)
This year's iteration adds a complication: the trio must now also reckon with the NFL knowledge of Michael Strahan, the former Giants defensive end turned Fox analyst, whose own Super Bowl credentials presumably reside in a different cerebral neighborhood than Mr. Brady's.
The campaign was developed by Fox's in-house creative team, which has been pushing the network's NFL promotions toward what executives have described as "weirdness" — a quality that, in the context of sports broadcasting, mostly means acknowledging that not everyone watching football arrived there via a lifetime of athletic devotion.
Whether Barb, Cornell, and Gerry will return for a third season remains, of course, a question for future Septembers. In television promotion, as in football itself, longevity is never guaranteed — only occasionally rewarded.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Why Fox NFL Promos Bring Back Original Characters for the First Time"