Fred Smoot was a lockdown cornerback at Mississippi State in 2000 whose long-shot Heisman Trophy candidacy featured a promotional picture of a vast ocean.

Water covers 70 percent of the Earth, the caption underneath read, but Fred Smoot covers the rest.

Catchy, yes, but it wasn’t enough to help Smoot join former Michigan All-American Charles Woodson (1997) as just the second full-time defensive player to ever win the Heisman Trophy.

Neither was the clever decision by zealous Oregon boosters in 2001 to shell out the $250,000 needed to splash an 80-by-100-foot display of quarterback Joey Harrington on the side of a New York City building located just across the street from Madison Square Garden. The promotion, which was designed to further promote Harrington to East Coast voters who hadn’t seen as much of him on TV, proclaimed him “Joey Heisman.”

Such player-specific ad campaigns are becoming less and less prevalent these days as college football’s growing popularity and proliferation on TV channels everywhere make the need for such efforts unnecessary.

“You are right that things have really changed,” wrote Claude Felton, Georgia’s longtime head of communications, according to a recent ESPN.com article. “One thing that has not changed is that a player needs to be on national television, perform well on that stage and the team needs to win. In days gone by, teams were not on television every week and there was more necessity for what we think of as ‘campaigns.’ Certainly would not say we would never do anything these days, but we’ll see how the season plays out.”

Felton will likely get that chance this fall if Bulldogs tailback Nick Chubb has anything resembling the kind of spectacular season he enjoyed as a freshman in 2014.

Social media has been another major reason why schools no longer need to go to such lengths to make sure voters and fans across the nation know of their player. The age of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like means that today’s college football stars become instant household names with the simple push of a button.

However, brand identity still remains an issue of sorts for schools not named Notre Dame, Alabama, Florida, Southern Cal, Texas, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio State and not a national draw each week.

Social media will certainly help bridge the gap, but there will always be room for creativity.

The SEC has claimed four of the previous eight Heisman Trophy winners, the most recent coming in 2012 when Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel won the award.

The Aggies never campaigned for Johnny Football. He won it as a redshirt freshman. Most national media didn’t know his name entering the ’12 season. Neither did A&M campaign for him in 2013.

“I think most folks know who Johnny Manziel is,” Texas A&M spokesman Alan Cannon said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney entered the 2013 season as a perceived Heisman Trophy candidate. His bone-jarring hit in the backfield on Michigan’s Vincent Smith got several million views on YouTube — and several dozen replays on ESPN.

“What more do you need?” said South Carolina spokesman Steve Fink, according to the WSJ. “I’m not sure a trinket’s going to get another vote for him.”

Media members must turn off the TV — and stay away from any device with an internet connection, including cell phones and iPads — in order to be ignorant of what’s going on in college football throughout the country.

That wasn’t the case in 1982, when Herschel Walker ran for 1,752 yards despite playing with a broken thumb early in the season. So Georgia, which appeared on national TV “just” three times that year, flooded the mailboxes of Heisman Trophy voters with Walker’s statistics every week.

Outside of tongue-in-cheek videos backing players at fringe positions like Arkansas guard Sebastian Tretola and Texas A&M punter Drew Kaser, we may never see a full-fledged Heisman campaign again in the SEC.

Saturday Down South editor Christopher Smith contributed to this story.