A new social film and an at-arena ‘Hooptopia’ pop-up experience sees the Golden State Warriors seek to unite fans from across the whole Bay Area as the team settles into its new San Francisco home the Chase Centre.
The campaign, conceived and developed by the team’s regular creative agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, is spearheaded by a social spot.
The video, which follows a flag-carrying fan running across the region – from the water’s edge and the bridges, to the parks and streets across the wider bay area – who ends his and ending up at the Case Centre, was posted across the team’s own social channels.
The creative seeks to unite fans across the whole region after the team’s move from Oakland to San Francisco and closes with the endline ‘Together We Are Dub Nation’.
Whilst the ‘Hooptopia’ pop-up promotes the Chase Center and seeks to offer fan visitors an immersive and social media friendly opportunity to experience the life of a Warrior.
Working with Candytopia, the team’s Hooptopia experiential space is located in the new ‘Thrive City’ – the new sports and entertainment development anchored by the Chase Center.
According to Warriors COO Rick Welts, the decision to become the first NBA tem to open a temporary interactive fan exhibit experience was the result of multiple factors and objectives including the growth of Instagram-led attractions.
“We developed this concept of wanting to trace the career of an NBA player, from their [recruitment] all the way to winning a championship. I think the project is being looked at as valuable [lesson], in terms of our industry moving forward and creating sports facilities of the future,” explained Welts.
“A standalone stadium or arena doesn’t make sense. We’re transitioning from a sports team that rented an arena to play its basketball games, to a sports and entertainment company that owns and operates one of the premier venues in the world,” he said. “We want to create an intellectual property that can have more value beyond just our appearance at the Chase Center.”
Experiential Warriors themed ‘immersive stations’ range from a zone where fans are strapped into a harness and lifted into the air to dunk, a measurement area where fans can test their own skills and size to members of the team, plus a locker room replica, a space where fans can have their own NBA title winning champagne celebration, a giant Steph Curry bobblehead, a cut-out of Adam Silver and even a simulation of the Warriors’ draft day war room complete with audio of phone calls from real past drafts.
Hooptopia is open daily through to 31 December and tickets cost $36 for adults and $27 for youths (fans need to reserve a time slot online) and so far attendance numbers are about 1,500 visitors per day).
Comment:
Hooptopia is an ambitious undertaking as the Warriors become the latest team to jump on the brand-themed, social media museum experience aimed at the Instagram generation.
While, with 23,000 views on Facebook seven days after it was posted, the social spot hasn’t exactly caught fire yet.
Much like the Warriors themselves this season: after years of NBA dominance, a combination of departures and injuries has seen the mighty Dubs crash from the top to the bottom of the league with just X wins after the first X games of the 2019/20 NBA season.
The social video follows on from the team’s move across the bay from its long-time Oakland base to a brand new home at San Francisco’s new Chase Center.
The team has full ownership of the $1.6bn Chase Center complex and the surrounding development.
Hence the strong emphasis not on the city but on bridges and the bay itself in its recent creative.
It follows in the footsteps of previous initiatives created for the team by agency GS&P: which has built marketing creative around the ‘Strength In Numbers’ big idea for the last four years.
For example, there was May 2019’s ‘Mini Movie’
and April 2019 campaign to mark the 7 April last regular season game for the Golden State Warriors in the Oracle Arena which saw the franchise retire the number 47.
The idea behind the campaign was to re-purpose the traditional US sports act of retiring an iconic player’s number to recognise and celebrate the 47 seasons during which the Warriors played in Oakland.
It saw the Warriors collaborate with local Bay Area lettering artist Erik Marinovich to renew and refresh ‘Strength in Numbers’ iconography and with streetwear legend Benny Gold to create commemorative shirts for each round of the 2019 NBA Playoffs.
The shirts were given away at the opening game of the playoffs at Oracle Arena, while a new ‘Strength in Numbers’ logo will be seen on out-of-home ads both in the arena and around the Bay.
The T-shirt design featured the Bay Bridge shaped like a basketball as it peers through the famous San Francisco fog – signifying the city’s emergence as a basketball town.
In addition to commemorating the 2019 playoffs, the design nods to the 47 seasons the team competed in Oakland and to the iconic diamonds on the outside of the arena.
This followed on from other campaigns such as 2018’s ‘Game Recognize Game’ (see case study),
2017’s ‘Brotherhood’ initiative,
and a May 2016 campaign, spanning film, print, OOH and design (also by GS&P), which set out to celebrate every number on the Warriors’ quest for the NBA championship and beyond.
This saw simple, iconic hash marks tally everything from Curry’s 3s to the home-win streak to a fan’s consecutive-games-watched streak to the number of kids helped by the efforts of the Warriors Community Foundation.
The campaign offered a platform and an opportunity to tell these stories through an artistic lens that represents the voices of the players, the fans and the community and it aimed to act a unifying rally cry that allows everyone to get involved.
Indeed, the ‘Strength In Number’s brand idea dates back to a 2015.
Links:
https://www.youtube.com/user/GoldenStateWarriors
https://www.facebook.com/warriors
https://www.instagram.com/warriors/
Hooptopia
Goodby Silverstein & Partners
https://goodbysilverstein.com/
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