Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay used the Florida Man meme to recruit male mentors in 2017. See how 22Squared flipped clickbait into a public service win.
ARCHIVEBig Brothers Big Sisters Turned Florida Man Into a Mentor Recruitment Tool
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay launched The Florida Man Project in May 2017, a digital native content campaign created by 22Squared that subverted the viral Florida Man clickbait phenomenon to recruit male volunteer mentors across the Tampa Bay area of the United States, earning a Bronze Effie Award in the Positive Change category in 2018.
The campaign's central mechanic is elegantly simple. Rather than running conventional public service advertising, 22Squared crafted outrageous fabricated Florida Man headlines — precisely the kind of absurdist tabloid bait that reliably attracts clicks — and distributed them where real trending Florida Man stories already circulate across social media. When curious users clicked expecting another laugh at the Florida Man's expense, they were instead met with warm, genuine footage of mentoring relationships: men and boys jumping into pools together, attending Tampa Bay Lightning hockey games, and sharing the kind of time that changes a young life. The call to action was direct and locally resonant: "Be the man that makes Florida proud."
The campaign also deployed an organic social layer, with the team placing replies in the comment sections of actual trending Florida Man stories across platforms — meeting the audience exactly where their attention already sat. According to bbbstampabay.org, donated native content placements were geo-targeted specifically to men in the Tampa area, concentrating the campaign's reach on the precise demographic and geography most likely to convert into Big Brothers Big Sisters volunteers. In the United States, the challenge of recruiting male mentors for youth-development nonprofits is well documented across the sector, and The Florida Man Project represents one of the more inventive attempts to solve it through earned cultural currency rather than paid awareness. The campaign comprised three digital media assets and operated entirely within the digital medium, with no traditional broadcast or print component.
ARCHIVEBig Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay needed male volunteers. The organisation's challenge in 2017 was not awareness of its mission but activation — specifically, persuading men in the Tampa Bay market to take the step from passive goodwill toward formal mentorship. 22Squared identified a shortcut through culture rather than media spend.
The Florida Man meme had by 2017 become one of the internet's most reliable engines of engagement. Real headlines aggregated under the Florida Man label consistently generated high organic sharing and comment activity across social platforms, according to coverage in Poynter, which has documented the phenomenon's editorial and cultural trajectory. That existing attention was, in effect, free media — and 22Squared recognised it as a distribution channel. Creative Director and Copywriter Matthew Zaifert articulated the logic clearly in MediaPost on May 19, 2017: "Since the media placement is part of the concept, we wanted the ads to run where people would normally encounter 'clickbait.'" The strategy collapsed the traditional distinction between creative and media, making placement inseparable from the idea itself.
In the United States, the nonprofit youth-mentoring ecosystem is highly fragmented, as noted by bbbstampabay.org. Big Brothers Big Sisters operates both as a national organisation and through independent local affiliates, with Tampa Bay functioning as one such affiliate. Competitors for volunteer time and philanthropic attention in this space include organisations such as Boys & Girls Clubs of America and local faith-based mentoring programmes, none of which had at that point deployed a native content strategy of comparable cultural specificity. By anchoring the campaign to a hyper-local cultural identity — the Florida Man — 22Squared made a national digital format feel intimate and geographically grounded to the Tampa-area men it was built to reach.
22Squared constructed fictional Florida Man headlines with the same tonal precision as the real ones. Headlines such as "Florida Man Attacked With Can Opener" and "Florida Man And Boy Struck By Lightning! Caught On Phone!" — reported by MediaPost — replicated the breathless, consequence-free absurdism that makes the meme work. The craft lay in making the fabrications indistinguishable from the genuine article at first glance, so the subversion of expectation upon clicking would land with genuine emotional force.
The video content that users encountered after clicking replaced the anticipated crime report or stunt footage with unaffected imagery of real mentoring interactions: a man and a boy at the Tampa Bay Lightning game, pool jumps, shared laughter. The tonal shift from lurid headline to warm reality was the campaign's core creative gesture, and its effectiveness depended entirely on the authenticity of that footage. Production credits for the campaign list Sarah Suits and Sara Haun as Producers, with Art Director Jason Roberts shaping the visual identity of the assets. Chief Creative Officer John Stapleton and Executive Creative Director Kevin Botfeld provided creative leadership, with Matthew Zaifert serving as both Creative Director and Copywriter. Media strategy was handled by Lindsay Apperson, and Senior Business Affairs Manager Jo Ella Mathis oversaw business affairs — all credited via bbbstampabay.org.
The organic comment-seeding component required a different kind of craft: editorial judgment about which real trending Florida Man stories warranted a reply, and copywriting dexterous enough to feel native to comment-section discourse rather than promotional. This element gave the campaign a living quality — it was not a fixed media buy but an ongoing act of cultural participation. In the United States, few public service campaigns of 2017 operated with that degree of real-time editorial responsiveness, which partially accounts for the attention the work attracted in trade press including MediaPost.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay and 22Squared won a Bronze Effie Award in the Positive Change category in 2018 for The Florida Man Project, as confirmed by bbbstampabay.org. The Effie Awards are among advertising's most rigorous effectiveness honours, requiring documented evidence of business or organisational outcomes — meaning the Bronze recognition confirms measurable impact even where granular figures remain unpublished.
According to bbbstampabay.org, the campaign increased applications from male volunteers in the Tampa Bay area. No numerical baseline, percentage lift, or conversion rate has been published publicly, and no verified budget or media value figures are available. No evidence exists of shortlisting or wins at Cannes Lions, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC, based on available records. The campaign received positive coverage from MediaPost on May 19, 2017, amplifying its reach within the advertising and marketing community at the time of launch.
Clapboard Score: 67/100. Structurally, the campaign succeeds on several dimensions that the score reflects: the creative idea and media strategy are genuinely unified, the cultural insight is specific rather than generic, and the use of donated native content demonstrates resourcefulness with nonprofit-scale budgets. Where the campaign leaves headroom is in measurable outcome documentation — the absence of published conversion data limits the ability to assess true return on the creative investment, a gap common across public service work of this period in the United States. The Florida Man Project nonetheless stands as a durable example of how a local affiliate with limited resources can compete for attention in the digital public service space through cultural intelligence rather than media spend.
The Florida Man Project was a digital public service campaign launched in May 2017 by Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay, created by 22Squared. It used fabricated Florida Man clickbait headlines to attract clicks, then redirected users to genuine mentorship footage, aiming to recruit male volunteer mentors across the Tampa Bay area.
22Squared created The Florida Man Project. The Tampa-based agency developed the campaign's creative strategy, fabricated Florida Man headlines, produced three digital media assets, and placed organic replies in real trending Florida Man story comment sections across social media to reach Tampa-area men.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay and 22Squared won a Bronze Effie Award in the Positive Change category in 2018 for The Florida Man Project, according to bbbstampabay.org. No verified evidence exists of shortlisting or wins at Cannes Lions, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, or the Webby Awards.
The Florida Man Project increased applications from male volunteers in the Tampa Bay area, according to bbbstampabay.org. No published figures detail the numerical lift or conversion rate. The campaign's Effie Bronze win in 2018 confirms independently verified effectiveness, though precise outcome metrics remain unpublished in available public records.
22Squared deployed donated native content geo-targeted to men in the Tampa area, placing fabricated Florida Man headlines where users would normally encounter clickbait. The agency also seeded organic replies into real trending Florida Man story comment sections across social media, as confirmed by bbbstampabay.org and reported by MediaPost in May 2017.
Matthew Zaifert served as Creative Director and Copywriter on The Florida Man Project. John Stapleton was Chief Creative Officer, Kevin Botfeld Executive Creative Director, and Jason Roberts Art Director. Producers Sarah Suits and Sara Haun oversaw production. All credits are documented via bbbstampabay.org for the May 2017 campaign.
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