The EasyPost Hawaii Bowl between the University of Hawaii Warriors and the Memphis Tigers unfortunately had to be canceled. But its namesake sponsor found a way to make the most of it.
It was supposed to be a glorious Christmas Eve for EasyPost.
The Hawaii Bowl is often the only major US-based sporting event on Dec. 24, and the game between Hawaii and Memphis on ESPN was slated to generate an immense amount of exposure for title sponsor EasyPost, a San Francisco-based shipping API that helps the big names in the industry go.
But when the University of Hawaii pulled out of the game due to COVID concerns, there was no time to bring in a replacement team (like the Gator Bowl did by replacing Texas A&M with Rutgers) and the bowl game was canceled. While Memphis at least got a free trip to the Aloha State out of it, not a bad consolation at all, what’s a title sponsor like EasyPost to do?
Pick your preferred metaphor, but EasyPost decided to make social media lemonade (or chicken salad, if that’s more your speed). The company took to Twitter to post about giving its social media guy an all-expenses-paid trip to Honolulu snap pictures of its logo on… well, an empty football field. Give this social person a raise, STAT!
Instead of being angry or depressed about its situation, EasyPost decided to have fun with it by leaning into the news and sprinkling in a little snark and gallows humor.
While its previous tweets got little to no engagement, interactions on Twitter have now spiked, with fans of different teams lobbying to have their squads replace Hawaii in the game.
What is EasyPost? A Company Profile:
Founded: 2012
Type: Private
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Industry: Technology
Product: API that assists in shipping, tracking, and address verification for top shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, DHL, and the US Postal Service
Website: https://www.easypost.com/
Twitter: @easypost
Instagram: @easypost
Mission Statement: “We’re on a mission to remove the technical complexities of logistics so customers can get back to growing their businesses. We’ve already saved our customers tens of thousands of hours of development, and we’re just getting started.”
I definitely hadn’t heard about or known what EasyPost was before the game was canceled, and that’s now changed because of some enterprising and creative social media.
They took what was seemingly a worst-case scenario and made it into something light-hearted and engaging.
With more events likely to get canceled over the coming weeks due to COVID-19’s Omicron variant, sponsor companies and various stakeholders across any and all sporting events should take note of EasyPost’s strategy.
Best laid plans can’t always come to fruition. EasyPost could have panicked, or simply packed it in and gone dark. But based on how they did choose to react, if you didn’t know their name before, you do now.
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