It didn’t compare in excitement to an overtime playoff game, but invitations by Boston Pizza to watch last weekend’s broadcast of the NHL Draft Lottery at its restaurants paid off for the chain.
Boston Pizza invited customers to view last Saturday’s event live at their local restaurant and invited media “looking for visuals of passionate fans” to film them. The lottery is a weighted system to determine the order of selection for the first 14 picks of the 2016 NHL Draft.
“We came up with the idea because Boston Pizza has such a tie-in with sports and sports fans and we wanted to leverage the draft in some way,” said Alexandra Cygal, senior director, communications at Boston Pizza International in Mississauga, Ont. in an email to Marketing.
To generate awareness, a Facebook post inviting fans to watch the NHL Draft Lottery at a local Boston Pizza was published across all 370 of Boston Pizza’s local restaurant Facebook pages as well as to its corporate Facebook page. Boston Pizza also put out a “Who picks first?” poster advertising the event on Facebook and restaurants could use posters to promote in-store.
The post “did a great job of including our brand in the draft lottery conversation and allowing us to engage with our fans from coast-to-coast,” Cygal says.
Conversation impressions about the brand on Facebook were 15% higher than on the same weekend last year, she says.
As well, “preliminary media coverage search shows we got some great coverage in Vancouver because we co-hosted the viewing party with the Canucks at our Stadium District restaurant.”
Fans in attendance at the Vancouver event could win prizes and meet Sportsnet hosts, Canucks alumni and the team mascot.
With all seven Canadian teams out of the playoffs, ratings for the first 20 games in the NHL’s first round were down 61% from last year from 1.306 million to 513,000 when there were five Canadian teams still in the running, according to The Hockey News.
However, the live broadcast on Hockey Night in Canada of the draft lottery hit 1.43 million viewers, according to overnight ratings from Numeris.
