TBWA\Chiat\Day New York launched its first campaign for Sport Chek since being named the brand’s lead creative and strategic agency in December with the basketball-focused “#WeGotNow.”
The spot celebrates the “high-fliers, the electrifiers, the buzzer-beaters, the brick-layers,” in short devotees of basketball of all kinds. Voiceover introduces these various types of basketball players, telling viewers to “Flash back to all the gyms that were empty when you practiced and half-full when you played.” It’s pretty run-of-the-mill sports anthem stuff, but its use of everyday amateurs rather than celebrities lends some weight to the closing line, “To every Canadian who never stopped believing that this game belonged to them, we got next doesn’t matter, because we got now.” The campaign launches ahead of the NBA All Star Game and will continue to run through the second half of the NBA season, with supporting digital, OOH and mobile elements.
“Canada is not the outsider in basketball many see it as, and we don’t have to wait for our moment to play,” said Frederick Lecoq, SVP of marketing at Sport Chek parent company FGL Sports to Josh Kolm of Strategy magazine in a story that ran this morning.
“The tagline reflects an insight about basketball culture and the way people talk. Basketball is a great territory for us, as a brand, to find more emotional conversations, but you can only do that if you’re authentic. The language and tagline is the kind of thing only truly genuine basketball players and enthusiasts might understand, but they’re the people we’re talking to.”