Green Bean Casseroles - NBC Sports' Thanksgiving Side Dish Bowl

NBC SPORTS’THANKGIVING SIDE DISH BOWL

When NBC and The Barn came up with the idea of the Side Dish Bowl (definitely a team effort), The Barn was very adamant about a couple of things about the project.

Find the balance of fun and serious. Fun was going to be the easy part. Immediately thinking of crazy brands for minor league baseball, but football is almost always serious. Even in college, with mascots like Turkeys and Trees, football is always a serious affair.
Believable. We could ways slap a picture of whatever food on a jersey. We could come up with wacky designs that no one has ever seen before…. The Barn wanted to make logos and uniforms that fans might actually think could and should be real. Designs that could actually be produced.
Push the design. Treat this like any of our other sports brands, and try to make something better than expected. How do we make a green bean casserole sports brand nostalgic? How do we pull visual elements from the canning process of Cranberry sauce into the uniforms? Never settle.

Cranberry Sauces - NFL Uniforms for NBC Sports Thanksgiving Side Dish Bowl

CRANBERRY SAUCES

In realms of all the designs, this one seemed to fall into place the fastest. We knew we wanted to do canned cranberry sauce. Mainly because it will be more divisive in an engagement campaign like this (oddly that is a good thing here), but the idea of canned cranberry sauce as a brand is hysterical.

ENTIRE TEAM BRANDING

PUMPKIN PIES

This brand was a classic case of “trust the process”. It kept getting better with every iteration, all the way to the point when we tried to combine pumpkin pie, with physical a pumpkin/jack-o-lantern.

ENTIRE TEAM BRANDING

Stuffing - NFL Uniforms for NBC Sports Thanksgiving Side Dish Bowl

STUFFING

This one fought us. But with our backs on the wall, the whole team (The Barn + NBC) put our heads together and the lightbulb finally came on for one of the strongest brands of the group.

ENTIRE TEAM BRANDING

GREEN BEAN CASSEROLES

This is where we everyone was pretty much in agreement right away. We always try to understand what makes up a brand. not just a logo, not just colors, but what emotions come from it. When we looked into the Casseroles one thing came to mind…. the same ceramic dish that every parent/grandmother/great aunt/friend down the street in America has somewhere in a cabinet.

ENTIRE TEAM BRANDING

Green Bean Casseroles - NFL Uniforms for NBC Sports Thanksgiving Side Dish Bowl

Potatoes - NFL Uniforms for NBC Sports Thanksgiving Side Dish Bowl

POTATOES

This design is where we wanted to really push the boundaries of what is phycisally possible in football design. Of course we could put a potato on the side of a helmet, but how could we do more?

ENTIRE TEAM BRANDING

The Barn helped us take on the exciting task of revamping not only our logo, but our entire brand. We couldn’t have been more pleased with the attention to detail and assistance with project management from Nick and his team. <It> was terrifying, but The Barn made the process feel almost effortless and brought our vision to life in the most vivid way.

Abbie Meadows

Marketing Manager, Columbus Cottonmouths

Results

Our biggest professional re-design to date has also been our largest award winning. The Barn was awarded with a Top 50 New Logos of the Year in 2016. With the Creamer Awards being the top of the top in sports design, them putting us in the same group as teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs is a pretty high honor.

Beyond awards for our agency it was wildly successful for the team as well. We all know that sports design is closely related to merchandise sales, and it is even more important in the minors where every dollar counts. We are proud to say that the Cottonmouths merchandise sales were more than double the year they launched the new branding!

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NBC Sports Side Dish Bowl - Cranberry Sauces

NEXT TEAM CRANBERRY SAUCES