This is Miami’s first Instagram Super Bowl. One sign: the Dude with Sign is here.
Seth Phillips brought his notorious cardboard sign to South Beach on Friday, his meme-monetizing crew in tow outside Fox’s broadcast center for Super Bowl 54.
Best known as Dude with Sign, Phillips became Internet famous in October with a photo of him standing alone in Manhattan, protesting with a scrawled message that went viral: “STOP REPLYING ALL TO COMPANY-WIDE EMAILS.”
He amassed four million Instagram followers, landed a promo with Old Spice and now he’s in Miami with a crew of at least four people managing his next moment. His message off Ocean Drive hints at more marketing dollars to come, with a new sign prepped for Super Bowl Sunday. “Hi Mom,” it read. “See My Sign on 2/2/20.”
Super Bowl returns to the Miami market for the 11th time on Feb. 2, a hosting record for NFL cities. But this is Miami’s first Super Bowl with Instagram, which launched about nine months after the game last came to Miami Gardens in 2010.
The social-media era affects how millions will see this Miami Super Bowl, where “gram-friendly” props are a must and brands try to pepper feeds with their preferred hashtags.
In Wynwood, the makers of the bathroom spray Poo-pourri set up an inflatable poo emoji and encouraged patrons to unload negativity with the hashtag “#letthat” and “go” around the scatalogical symbol. Fox used its high-profile set on South Beach to promote its #SuperMonday campaign that’s encouraging people to stay home from work after the Super Bowl and watch Fox shows. Fox’s public area included Lego busts of Michael Strahan, Jimmy Johnson and Fox’s other NFL broadcasters as a live promo for an upcoming Lego-building competition show hosted by Will Arnett.
Nearby, there were 16 people in line when members of the Wintz family in Chiefs gear slung their arms around the jumbo LIV letters set up on Miami Beach’s Lummus Park as part of the spectator area created around the Fox broadcasting hub. A neon “Super Bowl” sign hanging on a wall of foliage completed the backdrop.
The family of four from Kansas City — Tom and Cindy with daughters Aniston, 15, and Eden, 13 — had arrived in Miami about three hours earlier, and had already taken dozens of photos and videos, with postings on Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. Cindy Wintz said she’d probably hold off posting the shot from the LIV prop until she has a set of them with other backdrops. “I think I’ll do a collage,” she said. “I tend to post a lot.”
Nearby, Michael and Maya Kattan were embracing in front of the canary yellow 1955 Oldsmobile Super 88 that the Avalon Hotel parked on a closed-off Ocean Drive at Seventh Street. “It’s going on Instagram,” said Michael, in Miami Beach on a vacation from their home in Israel. “To make all my friends jealous.”
Twitter’s and Facebook’s ability to make a gripe go viral can cause problems for Miami’s Super Bowl brands, too.
“It used to be if you had a bad experience you might tell a few people. Now you can broadcast it out to lots of people very quickly,” said William “Lin” Humphrey, an assistant professor of marketing at Florida International University. ”Consumers trust other consumers more than they trust brands.”
Miami’s Super Bowl Host Committee set up a “social media command center” at the Miami Beach Convention Center to monitor online comments and questions about the event. It’s staffed by more than a dozen people and run by Miami’s Social Thinkking marketing firm.
“People take to Twitter and they take to social media to get questions answered,” said Jennifer Kaminski, a partner and founder of the firm. “We’re monitoring all of those conversations. We’re actually answering and engaging on behalf of the Host Committee and the Super Bowl.”
Kaminski said most questions involve start times for pre-Super Bowl events, like Super Bowl Live at Bayfront Park, and other details often already available online. “Why bother going on the website when you can tweet and someone will answer?”
For Phillips and his sign, the Instagram ripple effect was already under way during his appearance outside the Fox compound. Several passersby stopped to take his photo, and a Fox reporter approached him to confirm Phillips was, in fact, the actual Sign Dude.
He was, an Instragram star launched by viral-marketer F**K Jerry (a New York firm that doesn’t use asterisks in its name). A Jerry executive joined Phillips in Lummus Park, as did Javier Quinonez, a Kansas City resident with a background in “influencer marketing,” according to his website. The three were circumspect on their Super Bowl ambitions.
“We’re hoping to get a brand to buy him a ticket,” Quinonez said after Phillips lowered his sign for a brief interview. There were other messages on other pieces of cardboard, but the Jerry executive declined to show them.
The plan became clear later that day, when Sprint posted a photo of Phillips in the same spot, but with a different sign. “Someone buy me a ticket,” it read. Below it was an existing Sprint promotional hashtag “#WishItWereGuaranteed.”
So far, Phillips has only posted New York signs on his Instagram account, @dudewithsign, so Miami Beach could be his first out-of-town dispatch. Asked how he wound up there, Phillips offered a simple chronology.
“I held a sign in New York. It got really popular,” Phillips explained. “Somebody said: ‘Let’s go to Super Bowl.’”
This story was originally published February 1, 2020 at 6:00 AM.