Newsjacking: Jesse Cole Teases Spirit Airlines Becoming Banana Air

Jesse Cole is one of my favorite examples of somebody who excels at building fans. He’s grown his primary baseball team, the Savannah Bananas, into a powerful brand that sells out every game and moves millions in merch.

Famous for his yellow tux, and as the creator of Bananaball, Jesse is all yellow all the time. 

How cool is his short video post where he speculates on the fate of another yellow brand, Spirit Airlines, which recently went bankrupt. It's bright yellow planes are now grounded.

The video is only a few seconds long. Without naming Spirit Airlines, Jesse quietly says: “Why not. It’s got our color.”   As of this writing, Jesse’s Instagram post has 186,000 likes and 8,842 comments.

Newsjacking, the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story to generate tons of media coverage, get sales leads, and grow business, works when you’re quick to jump onto a news story that you or your organization has a direct tie to a story. Humor can magnify the power.

I interviewed Jesse on the field at Fenway Park for a chapter in my upcoming book The Fandom Playbook. I’ve watched Jesse from when he started with a small minor league baseball team with a few hundred fans per game. I love his story of creating one of the most powerful fandoms in the world.