Just moments ago, the minds that brought you the Danville Otterbots unveiled a second team that will also play in the southern Virginia town: the Danville Dairy Daddies, who will play in the collegiate summer level Old North State League. The nickname and a suite of logos highlighted by a hunky bull character pay tribute to Danville’s roots—and tell a story about its future.
“First and foremost, it is an homage to what is still the most prominent economic sector here throughout southern Virginia, which is agriculture,” said general manger Austin Scher. “There are families and generations of families throughout Danville and southern Virginia that grew up, if not on a dairy farm directly, up the road from a dairy farm, or they went to school or church or played youth sports with dairy farmers or children of dairy farmers.”
The anthropomorphic bull character, whose name is McCreamy, is wearing classic blue jeans with a giant belt buckle and no shirt, showing off broad shoulders, six-pack abs, and a come-hither look meant to make him the most popular animal on the farm.
“He is a bull. This is a Dairy Daddy,” said Dan Simon of Studio Simon, the firm responsible for creating the brand. “The whole concept centers around the word Daddies. The point is this is a smooth bovine. You know, he’s your daddy.”
While creating the character, Simon had one of pop culture’s smoothest talkers in mind: Joey Tribiani of the show Friends.
“How you doing?” asked Dan Simon of Studio Simon, in his best Joey voice. “The only difference is that I would like to think maybe this Dairy Daddy is a little smarter than Joey.”
Scher indicated that the team had another iconic image in mind as a model for their character: the enhanced physiques of the Bash Brothers, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire.
The brand is full of juxtapositions meant to make a statement about Danville itself. While the light pink and powder blue colors evoke the extreme innocence of a baby shower or gender reveal party, the character carries himself in a decidedly grown-up fashion. And while that character is meant to be something of a player, he’s still a bovine, one of nature’s least sexy animals. Even the over-the-top masculinity that the character exudes is undercut by the prevalence of a color the team calls “strawberry milk pink” in the brand.
The seeming contradictions are metaphors for the team’s hometown—where it has come from, what it is now, and where it’s going.
“We here in Danville view not just the club, not just the team here, but we view the city and the region and its current rebirth and vastly bright future as undeniable,” Scher said. “We look at this brand as an outward way to say Danville as a city, southern Virginia as a region, we’re here, you cannot ignore us anymore, we’re not going anywhere, so it’s time to get familiar.“
The bull’s perfect human form is meant to tell an aspirational tale, a metaphor for the ideal the town of Danville is striving to reach. The Dairy Daddy is not intended to be the everyman bull. He’s the bovine we might hope to be if we hit the gym every day, eat right, and take care of ourselves.
“To become something more than this city has ever been before, something more than a lot of folks ever thought it could be, the Dairy Daddy himself is that vision,” Scher said.
With all of these lofty concepts portrayed in the brand, there’s one detail with a more pragmatic explanation: The wordmark, set in a custom typeface that Simon describes as “cow-y,” is underscored by a bovine tail.
“That was included solely to keep the flies away,” Simon said.
The Dairy Daddies will share the Otterbots’ ownership, management, and ballpark, but will play in a different league. While the Otterbots play in the collegiate summer level Appalachian League, the Dairy Daddies will play in the Old North State League, also at the collegiate summer level.
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