ESPN Celebrates the Dawn of the College Football Playoff with Two New Spots

With the field set for the inaugural COLLEGE FOOTBALL Playoff, ESPN is readying fans for this new era with two new promotional spots debuting today. The first celebrates the final four teams vying for the title, and the other visualizes the first-ever 36-hour New Year's football holiday.

In "Playoff Ride," the dashed dreams of 124 Playoff-eligible schools are dramatically revisited across a swath of crushed TV monitors, leaving only the final four - Alabama, Oregon, Florida State and Ohio State - remaining.

The second ad, titled "Party Spread," invites fans to celebrate the new COLLEGE FOOTBALL "sports holiday." A 90-foot buffet table was created to bring to life the epic excitement of six bowl games happening over 36 hours, commencing on New Year's Eve and continuing through New Year's Day.
It begins with a journey through the New Year's Eve bowls - the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, Vizio Fiesta Bowl and the Capital One Orange Bowl. After a brief respite to ring in the New Year, the football revelry begins again on New Year's Day, with The Goodyear Cotton Bowl and the two Playoff Semifinals - the Rose Bowl Game Presented by Northwestern Mutual and the Allstate Sugar Bowl.

The journey culminates as the Semifinal bowls are brought to life via elaborate stadium recreations at the end of the table - a Rose Bowl constructed with hundreds of sculpted vegetables and cold cuts, and a Sugar Bowl in the form of a larger-than-life layer cake.

The spots are part of ESPN's integrated campaign "Who's IN?," which launched in August with "Different Ways In." The campaign not only set the stage for an historic season, but also served to educate fans about the new Playoff system, exclusively on ESPN. Wieden + Kennedy New York serves as the creative agency for the campaign.

A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the commercial is available here.

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