Following much fanfare and endless speculation, Rogers Communications formally launches its new 12-year, $5.2 billion rights deal with the National Hockey League this week.
The past six months have seen Rogers unveil a barrage of advertising promoting its new GameCentre Live package, as well as its Rogers Hometown Hockey broadcasts and even a video homage to the game itself.
Marketing spoke with Dale Hooper, chief brand officer for Rogers Communications, about the ongoing marketing efforts and what fans can expect this season. “When someone looks back, this will be the largest launch against two Canadian brands in the history of marketing hockey,” he said.
Does this represent one of the more elaborate marketing programs you’ve been involved with, just given the scope and all of the different moving parts, such as Game Centre Live, Sportsnet and Hometown Hockey?
What we’re about to embark on from a Canadian perspective will probably be the largest and most holistic campaign launched in Canada.
I know there are a lot of big Canadian brands, but we’ve got two iconic brands in Rogers and Sportsnet, both focused on owning a specific place in our customers’ and fans’ lives.
We’re bringing more innovation to Canadian hockey fans than has ever been brought before: Rogers GameCentre Live is now a much more immersive experience; GamePlus [a new feature for Rogers customers providing them with access to multiple camera angles] is going to enable Rogers customers to go really deep with camera angles and exclusive content they just can’t get anywhere else.
Layer on top of that Rogers Hometown Hockey, where we’re going to go to 25 communities and bring them the NHL experience, that’s a lot just on the Rogers brand.
Then you flip over to the Sportsnet brand, which is all about becoming the defining voice of hockey in this country. It is going to be what you loved about hockey in Canada before, for the new world of viewing.
What were the challenges and how did it come together? It’s not like you need to introduce hockey to Canadians, so what made this a unique marketing proposition?
One of the things we committed to with our partners at the NHL when we launched this was to bring more choice and opportunity for Canadians to engage with the amazing game.
The Rogers brand is all about access and innovation…so all we were doing from a marketing strategy [perspective] is letting Canadians know that we understand what they want, what’s important to them, and that we would deliver it across multiple platforms in new and engaging ways.
We engaged with [former NHL star] Mark Messier, who is a legend in hockey. He’s here to help tell our story of what we’re bringing to Canadians. He loves the game, as a fan, as a player and as an executive, and when he saw what we were doing with GameCentre Live and with GamePlus, he was blown away. He said ‘I’m a user of this product, and I think this is amazing.’
Can you provide some insight on how Mark Messier came to be involved? How did you determine that he would be the ideal brand ambassador?
Our “Reverence” campaign was really just letting Canadians know that Rogers, Sportsnet and the NHL understood how important this game is and we wanted to make sure they knew we would treat it with respect and would bring it to them in new and authentic ways.
As we started to embark on how we would bring GameCentre Live and GamePlus to life, we decided it was really important to have somebody who understands the game, has engaged with it on multiple levels – as a fan, a player and an executive – and who actually uses technology to keep up to speed with what’s going on.
Many people know Mark as a leader in the community, so we wanted to have him come on board – not just as a spokesperson in a commercial, but as a hockey ambassador to help with all facets of building our hockey program over the next couple of years.
It is starting with him talking about Game Centre Live, but it will evolve. You’ll see him be a part of a lot of our hockey decisions over the next couple of years (Messier has a two-year deal in place with Rogers). We’ll make sure we run our innovation agenda past him and get his insights. It’s a big role.
We’re also really proud that Luc Robitaille has agreed to be our spokesperson in Quebec. It’s relevant to our Quebec customers.
In terms of actually bringing Mark aboard, did the process go smoothly?
Mark came to our upfront when we launched to advertisers back in February, and from that moment on, he wanted to be part of this. He wants to be part of taking the game to a new level and engaging fans.
He considers himself a caretaker of the game of hockey – he’s done a lot of stuff in the New York area and across Canada in helping grow the game – and he thought that partnering with us would be the right thing to help him do what he loves to do, which is bring hockey to fans.
There are parallel campaigns for Rogers Hometown Hockey, as well as for Sportsnet, GameCentre Live and now GamePlus brands. What is the marketing challenge of having all of these parallel brands underneath one umbrella? I assume you want some uniformity, but you also want them to have their own brand essence.
Rogers Hometown Hockey and GameCentre Live are all part of the Rogers brand and they all link back to us bringing access and innovation to Canadians.
We wanted to have the right tone and the right manner, and that’s why Mark is perfect for our Game Centre Live campaign, while Ron MacLean is the perfect spokesperson for Rogers Hometown Hockey: His knowledge and his passion for bringing Canadian stories to life is unparalleled. He’s as excited about that as Mark is about leading the GameCentre Live piece.
If you look at Sportsnet, we really wanted to focus on our talent and how they understand the game and how connected they are to the players. With Sportsnet we’re all about telling the players’ stories. That campaign with George Stroumboulopoulos and Jeff Marek and Nick Kypreos really brings to life our talent and shows them in a light that exposes their knowledge of the game and their connection to the game, which I think will demonstrate how we’re going to be the new defining voice for hockey in this country.
You spent a lot of time in packaged goods marketing (Hooper’s career has involved stints with PepsiCo, Frito Lay and Cadbury), is there any kind of alignment or learning from your experience that can be applied to launching a hockey brand?
Building brands transcends industries, so what’s really important is understanding fundamentally what your brand is about, and then ensuring that the execution is consistent with that.
The biggest learning I’ve had [in my career] is that at the end of the day the execution and how consistent you are is what will be the most important thing. With the multiple campaign executions that we have going on, keeping them consistent to the ideas that Rogers is about – access and innovation – and Sportsnet is about, the voice of the NHL is just paramount.
The learning is bringing that consistency to life, and the fun part about this is in the new world we are thinking and acting in a new way – which is activating across multiple platforms.
Is the marketing objective to make the Rogers name synonymous with hockey?
We want to make Sportsnet the defining voice for hockey and ensure we drive audiences to all our platforms, and for the Rogers brand it is about ensuring that we drive value to our customers and engage them in new ways [and make them] feel they’re part of something bigger than just bringing data to them everyday.
As we get into Rogers Hometown Hockey, it’s bringing a new experience to our customers in those locations we don’t touch everyday. The idea is to ensure that we’re continuing to build our customers’ loyalty and providing them with value.
You’re still very much in launch phase at the moment, but when do you flip the switch on the next marketing iteration?
We’ll start a campaign after puck drop that talks to customers not just about GameCentre Live and that it’s free until the end of the year but that there’s more value there for Rogers customers.
That will be our campaign until the end of December, and as we move into the new year we’ll work on the new themes around the NHL. There are big events with the all-star game, the Winter Classic, the outdoor games and of course the playoffs. There’s a lot more in store as the calendar turns to 2015.
Can you provide some insight about GamePlus and the marketing approach?
GamePlus will enable Rogers customers access to camera angles they can’t see anywhere: A skycam, a ref cam and two or three other great angles, as well as exclusive video content produced every day.
Starting after puck drop we will have a whole campaign featuring Mark Messier talking about GamePlus and how it adds value and access for Rogers customers.
There will be some pretty typical traditional advertising on digital, and TV and radio, but there are also going to be some integrations in the Sportsnet broadcasts and Hockey Night in Canada where we will demonstrate all the different features. That will encourage people to check it out.
We’re also planning a whole social campaign on this: Sharing some of these camera angles will be huge, because they’re going to be some of the most innovative things you’ve seen in hockey.
There’s also a section called “My replay” which will enable Rogers customers to be able to watch a specific event from up to 10 different camera angles.
