No longer content to be a perimeter player, Bell is using its sponsorship of the Toronto Raptors to get deep inside the NBA franchise.
The Canadian communications giant has partnered with the Raptors on the third season of Open Gym, a weekly TV series that provides a behind-the-scenes look at the team’s players and coaches.
In addition to being a presenting sponsor of Open Gym’s 28 episodes, which air every Tuesday on Bell Media’s sports specialty channel TSN 4, Bell is also making extended episodes of the show available to Bell TV customers 24 hours before the broadcast premiere.
The company is also a presenting sponsor of the Open Gym After Show, which airs after Open Gym and features insight from both basketball insiders and Raptors fans. The show is available exclusively to Bell’s Fibe TV customers on the Bell Local community channel, as well as via the Bell TV app.
Basketball has emerged as a key sponsorship plank for Bell, which also sponsors NBA Canada and Basketball Canada.
Nicolas Poitras, vice-president of marketing and communications for Bell Residential Services, said the program is intended to differentiate its TV products and increase brand likeability, while underscoring Bell’s “TV anywhere” strategy.
While Poitras said Bell benefits from a brand association with an immensely popular sports franchise, the ability to provide its customers with unique content underscores one of the central promises of its products.
“As a [Raptors] sponsor we have several options as to how we can activate the sponsorship,” he said. “We’re in an era where sports marketing is experiential – you need to not only associate your brand with the brand you’re sponsoring, but you need to provide something for the fans, especially in the case of sports teams.”
Bell will also have five-second billboards before and after each episode of Open Gym reminding viewers that they can watch the show via Bell TV and Bell Local. It is also running 30-second spots promoting its Fibe TV products within each 30-minute episode. The ads were created by Bell’s agency, Zulu Alpha Kilo.
This is not the company’s first foray into the content space. It previously worked with the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens on a series called 24CH, and presented another series called The Event, a 10-episode show that provided behind-the-scenes access to Bell-sponsored cultural events including the Toronto International Film Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival and the Quebec music festival Osheaga.
“We said ‘In addition to just putting our logo, is there anything we can do to make the content shine and provide our customers with something unique?’” said Poitras. “We took the same approach [with Open Gym].
“Everybody benefits from the approach because the property gets an opportunity to shine, our customers get content we know they enjoy because they’re either big events or big sports properties, and we as a sponsor associate ourselves with all the goodness the content provides consumers.”
