Heisman campaigns, not just candidates, can be overnight sensations

Baker Mayfield loves video games, but not exactly the same way other college athletes love video games.

He loves them so much he once considered quitting football and becoming a professional video gamer, an anecdote uncovered in a story published in October on Oklahoma's athletic website.

The story included complementary multimedia elements, from a video to infographics on gaming and a pixelated, 8-bit version of Mayfield in a Sooners uniform. At first, it remained just a drawing. Then, Oklahoma's digital media department came up with an idea based on a YouTube video of Mayfield dancing that went viral over the summer. Thus, #ShakeNBake GIF 1.0 included a dancing, video game character Mayfield.

The real Mayfield has postponed his gamer career in favor of a football career. And since GIF 1.0, he has became the most efficient passer in the country (he ranks first in the FBS with a 180.69 rating) and is one of FBS' most productive quarterbacks (he ranks 14th with 322.9 total yards of offense per game). Meanwhile Oklahoma, which lost to Texas early in the season, has become one of the more intriguing teams in the College Football Playoff picture. And Mayfield has officially entered the Heisman Trophy race.

It was time for #ShakeNBake GIF 2.0: One that ended with pixel Mayfield doing the Heisman pose.

"We already kind of had a base to work with on it," said Russell Houghtaling, Oklahoma's director of digital media. "When we decided to run with a little bit of a Heisman push, we decided to take this foundation that we had already built that people already thought was cool, and really just expand upon it. When you attach the word Heisman to anything it can get a whole bunch of attention, especially if it has quality."

The Sooners athletic department — just like its counterpart at Stanford with its Heisman campaign for star running back Christian McCaffrey — realized early this season it could harness the power and immediacy of the Internet.

Instead of the U.S. mail or even email, social media is their primary delivery method. Instead of hiring an outside company to make cardboard game boxes or video game controllers touting Mayfield, for example, Oklahoma looked in-house and online. The Sooners believed they could make a bigger, faster splash with a fun GIF. Stanford felt the same about its interactive website for McCaffrey and its branding push, #WildCaff.

All it took was a clever digital team and some creativity.

"We’ve never been very big on sending out trinkets to promote our candidates; we’ve stayed away from the gimmick approach in favor of promoting on-field success and statistical comparisons to other Heisman winners in the past," said Mike Houck, Oklahoma's assistant athletic director for strategic communications and the author of the Mayfield piece in October.

"We think and hope that method is more effective. Baker is our first true Heisman candidate since Sam Bradford in 2008, when the prevalence of one-click touch and one-click media were nowhere what they are now. Certainly, we've embraced the digital options that are available to us. We have an incredibly talented digital media staff."

Houghtaling had a good feeling about the new Heisman GIF. He showed a few fellow staff members and watched their faces light up. He couldn't wait to launch it last Monday.

"Sometimes, you have a gut feeling that something's going to 'go,' " Houghtaling said. "I hate the term 'go viral' because we really don't know what that means — there's no measurement for it, so I just kind of use the word 'go.' You know when something's got juice. You know when you show it to people, and you say what do you think and you can see it on their face, that look of delight."

Once the GIF was approved and tweeted, Houghtaling and his colleagues sat and watched Twitter react.

"I imagine — I have no idea because I'm not an athlete — but it's like that contact when you hit a home run and you hear it, and you see it start to fly," Houghtaling said. "It's like seeing that trajectory; you stand there and watch it for a minute … and then go and get back to work. That moment's pretty fun, and we knew we had something before we even hit send with this particular one. It's a perfect mix of Baker's personality, something that's super shareable and fun, and in the moment."

Since the GIF launched on Nov. 16, Oklahoma has continued its Heisman push for Mayfield, using two hashtags — #ShakeNBake (which Mayfield had suggested for his own hashtag before the season began) and the more organic #Baker4Heisman. The Sooners athletic department has more pieces of its campaign in the works that it plans on launching in the coming days.

Stanford's strategy involves continually stoking a web site that it launched on Nov. 10. McCaffrey is far and away one of the most explosive players in college football, leading the Football Bowl Subdivision in all-purpose yards.

But with so many late kickoffs, there's a big portion of the college football universe that's only seen glimpses of that. So Stanford's Heisman Trophy push, which includes WildCaff.com, has been vital.

"The biggest thing with Christian was to tell the story about how dynamic he is," said Chris Gray, who leads Stanford athletics' digital operations. "It's very simple to create graphics and, I don't want to say it's easy to build a website, but to find a place to house everything that really embodies what Christian has done on the football field. Those were a lot of the main points that we sat down and discussed and really tried to execute on our end."

On its first day the site racked up 11,000 hits, which was a very significant number for Gray and his colleagues. It's more than tripled since. Through social media shares, it's reached a couple of hundred thousand people as well.

Before Stanford's Heisman push for McCaffrey, the school had never promoted a Heisman contender with a legitimate campaign. Andrew Luck didn't get one in his run to a second-place finish in 2011, and neither did Toby Gerhart, who finished second in 2009. So Gray and his colleagues at Stanford couldn't necessarily predict the success of their effort.

"The biggest thing that we talked about in our meetings was the fact that we have the resources and we have the ability to create these kinds of dynamic things for Christian, so why not?" Gray said. "And he was absolutely deserving of it so we went forward and we starting building."

The #WildCaff hashtag has been the calling card of the campaign, an idea borne out of an observation made by sports information director Alan George entering the season.

George had commented that McCaffrey always seemed to run out of the wildcat — his role has expanded since — and it seemed like a good marketing nickname.

"He's just so explosive and dynamic on the football field that we felt that that really enveloped him as a football player as well," Gray said. "So, it was a two-fold thing, but we felt very comfortable coining #WildCaff, and especially the uniqueness of it as well. Nobody else has used that before that we know of. … He's such a unique football player, so we felt like it came full circle."

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