The University of Calgary Dinos, Calgary's local college basketball team, has watched the city’s love for basketball grow exponentially over the last decade. In fact, Calgary now has more hoops per capita than any other major city in Canada. But that growing passion hadn't translated into support for the Dinos basketball team: they hadn’t sold out a game since 2019.
When Calgary was chosen to host Final 8, Canada’s National Basketball Championship, for the first time in 46 years, the Dinos had to find a way to get the basketball community excited about their home team — and to show up to the tournament. And they didn’t have a lot of resources to work with.
While Calgary hadn’t been showing enthusiasm for the Dinos, over the last decade, basketball in Calgary had been exploding. The city’s youth basketball participation alone has doubled since 2019, and new, highly-regarded outdoor and indoor courts are constantly opening up. We did the math — counting hoops in representative neighborhoods across Canadian cities and extrapolating using population data.
This dovetailed with a challenge: a nonexistent media budget. We couldn’t rely on a traditional awareness campaign; we had to get people invested enough to spread the word for us.
That gave us our strategy: targeting Calgarian basketball lovers by creating a media space from the hoops already in front of them.
We had tons of hoops in front of a passionate audience — so we hijacked them. We created an AR experience that turned the city’s backboards into billboards of support for the Dinos. The experience tapped users’ cameras to scan backboards and anchor support to them, featuring that hoop’s GPS coordinates. So, every shout out to the Dinos was unique to the person posting – and the court it featured.
We knew basketball fans love a bit of trash talk, so to drive them to the activation, we not only gave them a chance to buy tickets and win Dinos prizes, we challenged them to claim their home courts as Dinos territory — and send a message to visiting teams that they were on Dinos turf now, and the city was behind them.
This interactive experience, combined with an innovative use of free “media” space, got fans interacting with their home team and invested in the Final 8 tournament, turning backboards across Calgary into billboards for the Dinos.
We got Calgary to buy tickets and show up: the first Dinos game of the tournament sold out — their first sell-out crowd in 7 years. Dinos players themselves remarked on the energy of the crowd and sheer amount of people at the event; none of them had experienced anything like it in their time on the team.
With over 4 million impressions (in a city with a population of just 1.5 million people) and communities across Calgary participating in the activation, we achieved our goal of tournament ticket sales — and we got the community to care about and cheer on the Dinos.
