What’s the craziest idea ever pitched at a Savannah Bananas idea and brainstorming session?
(These gatherings are aptly named “OTT meetings,” OTT standing for “over the top,” if that helps inform your guess).
... Skydiving from a plane onto the mound to immediately throwing out the first pitch, obviously.
“There’s a lot of legalities with that one,” said Kara Heater, VP of marketing for the Bananas, laughing. “We want it bad, and we will do it one day, I promise. ... That one’s been pitched since like 2020, but we’ll get it done.”
The digitally savvy Bananas have built a social media empire with ideas slightly more doable, but consistently on-trend and entertaining. Playing baseball in their own unique style of Banana Ball year-round since 2022, they’ve amassed more TikTok followers (9.3 million) than any MLB team, plus MLB itself, and have more Instagram followers (2.8 million) than most MLB teams. Granted, both the Bananas and their foil team, The Party Animals (780,000 followers on Instagram, 2.5 million on TikTok), have more time and license for silliness and fan engagement than the pros.
After this weekend, they can add Truist Park to the list of sold-out professional stadiums in which they’ve played, twerked and lip synced to a sea of bright yellow.
“We think of ourselves as a show rather than a game a lot of the times, to make sure that we’re bringing the best experience to fans,” Heater said. “So when it comes to marketing, we really want to make sure that we are holding true of our mission statement, which is fans first, entertain always.”
Some of the shenanigans you’ll see are indeed freestyle, depending on if one of the players for the Bananas or Party Animals feels like doing a backflip after ripping a double. But many of their ideas, from potential social media posts to choreography, evolve throughout a “Saturday Night Live” style of weekly routine.
Every Tuesday, there’s the OTT meeting, with staff and a player representative pitching ideas for the games that weekend (the players have their own meeting to formulate ideas before sending a rep to join with staff). They narrow it down, then have a table read later Tuesday to go through the run-of-show.
Rehearsals run Wednesday through Friday, then the shows begin. The Bananas have a marketing team of five, per Heater, with six video staff helping capture all the action. That action is key to the game itself and performing for the crowd gathered, but it increases in reach when posted to social media.
You go in with a plan, but that goes hand-in-hand with improvised moments, said Jackson Olson, a Bananas infielder and social media star (1.8 million followers on TikTok, 714,000 followers on Instagram).
“The improv moments usually get the most views because no one expects it to happen,” Olson said. “I mean, obviously a big run-scoring celebration or a big walk-up. Those get a lot of views, but sometimes our left fielder twerking in the outfield might get more.”
The Bananas first went viral on Facebook in 2016, when they were still playing in a college summer league, with “Can’t Stop the Peeling,” a rendition of Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” featuring spirited lip syncing, fans grooving along and a team dance huddle at home plate.
“I think it’s really how we built it,” Olson said of how integral social media is to what the Bananas have built. “I mean, obviously Banana Ball is an up-and-coming sport, and it’s going to be amazing, but social media has allowed our fans to get an inside look when they’re not able to come to the games. We can have 40,000 people in the stadium, but millions more at home watching that become fans because of that.”
Olson’s take on the skydiving efforts, for the record: “I would never put it past (team owner Jesse Cole) to do anything, except for play on the moon. And we might do that, too. So honestly, yeah. I could see it happening.”
It helps the marketing and social media efforts of the Bananas and Party Animals that their rosters are jam-packed with players (many of them former college baseball players, such as Olson, who played at Hartford and Stetson) who have their own impressive followings and are willing to put on a show for fans and play it up for the cameras.
“The players are a huge part of what we do,” Cole said. “I mean, they’ve built over 15 million followers themselves by showing up every day and showing fans something behind the scenes. Most athletes, they have to put all their focus on performing on the field. For us, it’s our players, our focus on how can they create fans every day? And that’s everything. The name of our company is Fans First. We ask, ‘Will it create fans?’ And if every day our players, our staff, our cast and we’re thinking about that and doing that, you know, I think the future is pretty bright.”
The Bananas’ social media journey hasn’t always been smooth, with a course correction six years ago after hosting events featuring food trucks or haunted houses that they struggled to sell tickets for, Heater said, also seeing online engagement dwindle.
They noticed many of their posts were recruiting fans to join mailing lists or make some sort of purchase.
“We learned the hard way back in 2019 that fans don’t want to feel sold,” Heater said. “They want to feel valued. So when it comes to our content that we’re posting, we really make sure that there’s rarely any call to actions in any of it. So 99% of the content you see going out is simply just for fans to enjoy and just have fun and build some fandom for the teams. But it’s not asking them to join a list. It’s not asking them to buy a ticket or buy a piece of merch. It’s simply just there to spread joy and positivity.”
That’s the philosophy they embrace, focusing on shareable content that people will find entertaining or laugh at instead of simply views.
They also do their best to answer all fan direct messages, Heater said, and, taking fan engagement a step further, have started trying to take fan ideas and actually implement them in games (such as when a TikTok user suggested Hillary Duff’s “Coming Clean” as a walk-up song and got to see it actually happen).
“It’s just really cool to make sure that they feel involved because we would be nowhere without our fans,” Heater said. “So we want to make sure that they’re always feeling special, always feeling like we’re putting them first in everything we do.”
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