Tulane Football 2024 Uniform Reveals: A Case Study in Virality
Uniform Reveals - they’ve become ubiquitous with College Football. Each week teams take to social media to launch flashy, highly produced video and crisp photos of student-athletes rocking that week’s threads. Some take the form of skits, others hype videos, but they all share the same purpose - create buzz while alerting the fanbase to what the team will be wearing. I had the pleasure of full creative control over the 2024 Uniform Reveals for Tulane Football, increasing views by 84.1% - here’s how.
Firstly, I looked back to the 2023 season to establish a baseline - see what worked, what didn’t, and where we could improve. While the 2023 visuals were strong and skit-style videos were compelling, generally the 2023 Uniform Reveals were too long, too slow, and lacked saturation - they didn’t jump off your feed. In a social media landscape where users have ever-decreasing attention spans, bold, upbeat content tends to perform best. Since the goal is to showcase the uniform and generate gameday hype, I focused on maximizing the content’s potential for virality.
While the 2023 Uniform Reveal baseline was strong - 346.4k views total on Instagram - I was confident that I could not only improve on those metrics, but tell Tulane and New Orleans’ story while doing so. My framework was relatively simple - ensure every clip had motion, lean on local, New Orleans music for audio, crank the saturation, and keep the whole thing under 15 seconds. Oh, and make it loop…
Week 1 had an instant impact - the 64.7k views on Instagram were more than any of the 2023 Uniform Reveal videos registered on that platform and tripled the engagement of the Week 1 video from 2023. Buzz was successfully created for Jon Sumrall’s Tulane Head Coaching debut, an impressive 52-0 rout of Southeastern Louisiana.
Following a rain-impacted shoot for Week 2 and a Week 3 shoot cancelled due to Hurricane Francine, Week 4 saw Safety Bailey Despanie enjoy some classic New Orleans fare - coffee and beignets at Tulane corporate partner Uptown Coffee. Ahead of an important in-state matchup against the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns, it felt the right time to lean on the City of New Orleans, and the city delivered - 57.3k views and a 41-33 Wave win.
Week 8 vs Rice was a personal favorite of mine. Working with Team Captain and fan-favorite Sam Howard, we employed my personal rice cooker to have Sam cook a pot of rice at midfield of Yulman Stadium - Sam cooked rice, then he (and the Wave) cooked Rice. The primary driving factor behind the success of the Week 8 video was the absurdity of seeing a linebacker - in full uniform - operate a dinky rice cooker on a football field. Married with the context that the opponent was literally Rice… a perfect recipe for virality.
Week 11 saw the Wave playing on Halloween at Charlotte. After iterating on various trick-or-treat related sketches, I settled on Senior Wide Receiver Dontae Fleming trick-or-treating at Tulane Athletic Department legend Dr. Michelle Adam’s door. While filming in the dark certainly presented a challenge, the concept and the return of the Wumbo helmet saw this video generate an eye-popping 270k views on X.
Each video - except for Week 14 collaboration with New Orleans podcaster Hold The Mayo - featured a looping transition technique, where the final clip of the video aligned and perfectly transitioned back into the first clip, thus creating a “loop”. Not just for show, this loop technique encouraged more views as it blurred the line between start and end, increasing watch time and signaling to the Instagram algorithm that our video was popular.
In all, the 2024 Uniform Reveal videos averaged 45.6k views per week - an 84.1% increase over the 24.7k per week performance in 2023. Tulane Football continued building on the successful 2024 formula, using the momentum of the City Edition uniforms to reach close to a million fans already in the 2025 season.
