TRUE MEDIA AND FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS
Your Sports Marketing Super Team
You would be hard-pressed to find a super-team with as much experience within the world of sports marketing than us. From helping Bauer Hockey (and Nike Bauer) earn six Effies for marketing effectiveness in six consecutive years, to helping the Detroit Pistons’ earn Brandweek’s Marketer of the Year award for their iconic “Goin’ To Work” initiative, to helping the Minnesota Timberwolves fill the stat sheet with numbers like $1 million of revenue and a 356% Return On Ad Spend – while facing some mighty North headwinds, we know what it takes to connect your brand to your believers at lasting level of shared values. We know how to test, learn, measure and optimize at every turn, tactic, and touch point. And we know how to use the power of soul to drive sales.
FEATURED CASE STUDY: MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES
How does a poor-performing, mid-market NBA franchise selling against four other major pro teams, a Big Ten University, and its own past work to instill belief in its fan base, increase ticket sales by 18%, and realize a 358% return on ad spend?
WITH A MEDIA STRATEGY, CREATIVE, AND CONNECTIONS SUPER TEAM.
In nearly 30 years as a franchise, the Minnesota Timberwolves have had more coaching changes than playoff appearances. So, more than diehards, the fan base is understandably filled with skeptics, head shakers and non-believers. Put simply, the Wolves needed to find a way to inspire everybody – both inside the organization and out – to adopt a new, shared mindset and journey forward, together.
Here are a few of the highlights from that journey: from brand strategy and creative platform to connection planning, execution and measurement.
FIRST, WE GAVE THE BRAND SOUL
CREATIVE HIGHLIGHTS
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Then, we changed the Wolves’ marketing, media and measurement mindset.
we started with audience-first planning
We segmented the audience based on syndicated research and multi-channel media behavior, and applied a full-funnel approach to driving individual game ticket and multi-game flex package revenue, while also supporting season membership sales.
then we added a new scoreboard stat: Persuadability
After our first season, we began to take the guesswork out of the marketing equation by testing different digital partners, ad units, messaging, etc., with a focus on continual improvement of defined KPI’s. In time, this improvement led to plotting “persuadability” of our different target audiences based on known behaviors from research.
We brought method to their measurement.
In conjunction with our Audience First strategic planning approach, we spend a lot of time defining campaign KPI’s and how we will uniquely measure them. Below is just an example of the different digital and audience measurements defined for a campaign.
We added new data points to their dashboard.
Archiving our measurement strategies is a dynamic marketing dashboard that captures the performance of paid media against the specific KPI’s being measured. The dashboard helps us keep our finger on the pulse of what is working, what needs improvement, and what trends to pay attention to looking forward.
We tracked the Pack’s customer journey across channels.
Our full-funnel visualization helps to better align unique marketing strategies for each product we’re selling with paid media support, i.e. individual games, flex packs and season memberships.
We can now measure sentiment through social listening.
Beyond measuring paid social and programmatic digital, we also overlay traditional mass media that is running as well as monitoring brand sentiment across social channels to learn how each is affecting our overall goals in producing more revenue from paid media efforts.
Thought starters on being relevant during COVID and no foreseeable ticket revenue.
To remain relevant today, we believe we can align with popular culture moments and engage fans in new and different ways until a vaccine exists providing consumer confidence to return to all of the professional sports stadiums and arenas. We can track Google Trends and other technology platforms to monitor trending topics and quickly assemble and produce content aligning our sports brand with these pop culture moments in a positive way.
Selected Category Work & Case Studies
DETROIT PISTONS
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NOLA HORNETSS
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BAUER HOCKEY
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OTHER GREATEST HITS
TARGET FIELD
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DWIGHT HOWARD
We’ve racked up some pretty big W’s along the way.
- Over $10,000,000 in measured ticket sales revenue attributed to paid media
- Equates to thousands of transactions tracked from initial consumer engagement of ad unit to actual sale via pixel and mega-tagging
- Established baseline of media allocation maximizing revenue of both traditional and digital media, i.e. proper investments in both brand building and response tactics
- More definitive timing sequence of ad unit deployment to maximize revenue opportunity and lessen production cost, i.e. AI dynamic creative
- Leverage 1st party data to identify additional micro targeting opportunities
IS THIS type of sports marketing super-team you’d like on your roster? Let’s connect!
