Frisco, Texas, rapidly transformed from a small North Texas town into a global hub for professional sports, now home to organizations like the Dallas Cowboys and the PGA of America and an upcoming base camp for a crucial component of the upcoming FIFA World Cup. The Sports City USA™ brand had been secured years before, but never properly developed or supported with a full brand identity.
To make the most of its growth and global claim to fame, the Visit Frisco Destination Management Organization (DMO) needed to develop a strong brand presence for Sports City USA™, one that would resonate with national and international teams, elite sports organizations, and event planners.
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
Audience Overview
The Sports City USA™ brand was strategically designed to reach sports event decision-makers evaluating host destinations for upcoming competitions, tournaments, and industry events. These audiences are highly sought after and consistently exposed to heavy volumes of marketing through email, direct mail, trade shows, and industry media.
They are accountable to boards, governing bodies, athletes, and communities. As a result, they seek clear validation that their host city selection is credible, respected, and aligned with their stakeholders’ expectations. The target audience included:
To produce a brand that resonated with our audience and a supportive marketing plan to reach our target markets, our solution focused on:
Our implementation was comprised of five strategic pillars of work. Our main challenges were related to launching both a fully realized brand identity and a fully branded seven-part documentary series at the same time. Additionally, the project had to be endorsed by City Council and the Mayor’s office, creating timeline and approval challenges. Through it all we found success by focusing on our strategy:
Building a Collaborative Foundation
We established a Steering Committee that included representatives from Visit Frisco, Frisco City Council, The Dallas Cowboys, Frisco RoughRiders, Dallas Stars, PGA of America, and FC Dallas. This team took responsibility for overseeing the branding process and eventually evangelizing the brand and holistic project.
The Discovery phase then involved an extensive online survey distributed to city residents, city staff, event planners, and the local sports community. Collaborative working sessions and information sessions were conducted both in-person and virtually with VERB, the Visit Frisco team, and the Sports City USA™ Steering Committee. The Steering Committee’s influence and connections across the City helped us solve challenges with approvals, timelines and logistics.
Building the Brand Platform
The branding process included the development of a full brand voice and tone, personification, brand tagline and visual identity including a logo, animated elements, and color palette. The rebrand was a successful effort in coalescing diverse institutional voices into a single, powerful message: Sports City USA™: Where Greatness Grows. The development of the brand helped bring life to the in-progress docuseries, enabling the series editors to play with new animations and creative treatments using the brand.
The Docuseries: Content as a Unifying Force
The docuseries, the central marketing asset, served as the launch vehicle for the new brand and acts as an ongoing sales toolkit Visit Frisco can use at tradeshows, in RFP submissions and to share with leads. The process involved meticulous planning with comprehensive storyboards, archival research, and a strategic launch plan. To ensure authenticity and rich storytelling, interviews were conducted with key stakeholders, residents, and leaders across the sports community. Initially planned for six episodes, the series was extended to seven short-form episodes during post-production to ensure maximum content engagement and flow. The Steering Committee was onboard at every step of the way, helping to source additional footage, line up key interviews and provide feedback and ideas on each episode’s story arc. Full series: https://www.visitfrisco.com/where-greatness-grows
Brand and Docuseries Launch
Held at The Dallas Cowboys headquarters, in their luxurious team theater space, the launch was designed as a major community event, an opportunity to premiere the series, celebrate the contributions of all stakeholders, and educate the public about the new "Sports City USA™" identity. This premiere acted as the ultimate inter-company activation, bringing together the city, sports organizations, businesses, and residents to collectively own the new brand narrative. The community-wide involvement led to a significant amount of organic sharing across LinkedIn, which further supported the goals of reaching a business audience (specifically a sports event-focused audience) and building community pride.
Advertising Strategy
Once the brand and docuseries were live, we launched an advertising campaign to help build awareness of the destination’s brand promise amongst the target audiences outlined above. Our paid media plan focused on upper funnel tactics designed to get our target markets to understand the new brand and engage with the docuseries, leaning heavily on video units. We leveraged Google Demand Generation ads, YouTube advertising, ESPN digital ads, and a comprehensive paid approach across Meta (Facebook, Instagram) as well as programmatic display via our programmatic partners at Equativ.
The Sports City USA™ brand has contributed to an 81% increase sports-specific lead room night volume since launch, while the Visit Frisco Sales and Meetings and Events teams have generated much-coveted booking inquiries from Olympic Governing Bodies following a brand reveal and docuseries screening.
The brand and docuseries were also shared at several conferences including BizBash Sports and US Sports Congress, leading to many important business conversations for Visit Frisco’s sales team.
Additionally, during the campaign period we saw 27.5K+ qualified audience sessions to the brand landing page, 2.2M+ video ad views, and 9.5M+ ad impressions.