There are three thumps, then the sound of two hands smacking against a pair of glass doors. A panting Kyle Lowry opens one door a crack and sticks his head in.
The Toronto Raptor grins. “Anyone want to sub me out?” he says, shoulders heaving, to the room of agency staffers and production workers who have been watching him on a set of TV monitors run back and forth across a basketball court.
It’s Saturday, Jan. 24, and Lowry is filming his first commercial for Sport Chek, part of a new two-year sponsorship deal he’s just inked with the retailer. Two weeks later, the deal will be announced at a press conference at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto to great fanfare.
Sport Chek CMO Duncan Fulton and Toronto Raptor Kyle Lowry with the Markham-Unionville Basketball Association at the ACC.
For Sport Chek, the Lowry endorsement is a coup. Just two days before the commercial shoot, Lowry was selected to play in the 2015 NBA All Star game, making him the Raptors’ first all-star starter since Chris Bosh in 2008. Lowry’s one of the team’s most recognizable players, a rising star who, along with DeMar DeRozan, is being positioned by the Raptors as a replacement for the marketing star power of the Bosh brand.
His signing is part of a growing commitment to basketball by Sport Chek, a sport the retailer’s CMO Duncan Fulton says has “grown exponentially” over the past two years. At the start of the NBA season, Sport Chek rolled out its basketball-themed “My North” campaign; an expansive effort that included a series of online videos showcasing the street-level basketball culture of each of the neighbourhoods in the Greater Toronto Area and an anthemic spot inspired by The Raptors breakout “We The North” campaign. Both those efforts helped earn each marketer a spot on Marketing‘s 2014 Marketer of the Year shortlist.
Moving forward, Lowry will serve as the face of “My North,” but he’ll also be used in other Sport Chek communications. On Jan. 24, the brand simultaneously shot visuals with Lowry to share on its social channels, web videos and footage for more than one broadcast ad.
The first TV spot to launch is the centrepiece of the retailer’s new “All Sweat Is Equal” campaign, which debuted Feb. 13 (the kickoff to the NBA All Star weekend). The ad, by Sport Chek agency of record Sid Lee and Sons and Daughters productions, features Lowry as part of an ensemble of Sport Chek athletes, including Tampa Bay Lightning player Steven Stamkos, soccer player Christine Sinclair and trampoline gymnast Rosie MacLennan.
The ad also features the DJ A-Trak, who contributed to the score, Lowry’s trainer (and Raptors head of sports science) Alex McKechnie and a cast of amateur athletes–some of whom have the same names as the pros and will “face off” against them in future ads. In the first “All Sweat Is Equal” spot, both the amateur and pro athletes are shown in intense training sessions, building up to a sweat-covered conclusion that shows each panting in a resting stance.
The idea, says Sid Lee executive creative director Jeffrey Da Silva, was to show the grunt work of training, not the glory moments we usually see in sports ads–stars hanging off a net after a slam dunk or shooting a winning goal.
“We never see Kyle Lowry doing suicides on the basketball court, or chin-ups. We tend to see him in a Raptors jersey doing his thing” he says. “We thought it was important for consumers to be able to visualize themselves in the situations. It’s easy to glorify sports and see elite athletes, but as a consumer, it’s difficult to identify with that.”
“We wanted to make sure people could identify with the imagery and say, ‘Christine Sinclair runs laps on a field, I also do that.’”
With a media buy by Touché, the ad is currently running on a mix of conventional and specialty TV in both 30-second and one-minute formats, with a focus on sports properties and games. It will run during March Madness, NHL and NBA games and at Cineplex theatres across the country.
Frederick Lecoq, senior vice-president of marketing at Sport Chek parent FGL Sports, says the media buy is one of Sport Chek’s biggest, rivaling its spend during last year’s Olympics.
Lecoq says Sport Chek sees “All Sweat Is Equal” as the platform most of its 2015 marketing will be built upon. It’s an extension of “Your Better Starts Here,” the fitness-oriented positioning Sport Chek introduced in 2010, with a sharper focus on training. The retailer has already started working on a series of online videos and web content around training to release throughout the year as it moves away from campaign-based marketing.
It’s considering everything from social media to in-store communications and live events that will roll out throughout the year rather than in the traditional six to eight week campaign window.
Like the first spot, which Lecoq calls a training “manifesto,” future ads and content will show athletes in training-mode and offer tips for customers looking to get in shape. The brand is betting those behind-the-scenes shots in the gym will be more relatable for its customers than a glory-filled sporting moment. It’s also hoping the training-focused campaign will brand it as a destination for workout gear, not just sporting equipment.
Sport Chek’s Fulton says Sport Chek is positioning training as an “underpinning platform” for all of its marketing. While some of its marketing targets fans and players of specific sports, he sees “All Sweat Is Equal” as a kind of umbrella campaign that casts a net wide enough to include anyone who plays sports or works out.
It’s also a change of pace for the retailer, which ran a series of ads featuring Olympians last winter. Though the new spot similarly features sports celebrities, Fulton said Sport Chek is putting the emphasis on training more-so than star power with the aim of customers seeing themselves in the ad.
“It doesn’t matter what sport you’re in, it doesn’t matter if you’re 70 years old and walking at night or if you’re a runner or a hockey player. Everyone who’s active in some way trains,” Fulton says.
Back on set, Lowry runs his final suicide sprint. All day a production assistant has been trailing him with a spray bottle, spritzing him every time his skin dries. This time the sweat is real. The night before he was on the court with the Raptors (the team beat the Philadelphia 76ers 91-86) and that morning he was at practice training with his teammates. For the past fifteen minutes he’s been sprinting back and forth across the gym as the camera follows him.
Lowry rests his weight on a chair and turns to the crew with a smile. “I ain’t work this hard today,” he says of his morning practice. He shakes his head. Someone says the shot looks good and asks Lowry if he wants to see it.
“Nah, I don’t want to see it. I felt it,” he says.
