Sports Illustrated Stadium Concert Series

The brief

A stadium changing its name is not a ticket problem first. It is a recognition problem. The venue formerly known as Red Bull Arena was relaunching as Sports Illustrated Stadium, and the concert series was the vehicle for establishing what the new name stood for.

That reframes the whole campaign. The measure of success is whether a 25,000-seat venue twenty minutes from Manhattan enters the consideration set for artists, promoters, and audiences who had not thought of it that way before.

What MCC did

We built the campaign as brand positioning with a concert series attached, not the other way round. The marquee bill of Ludacris, Ashanti, Flo Rida, and Rick Ross established the calibre of programming the venue intended to host.

Integrated Meta and Google carried reach and targeting. Artist-led video creative did the persuading, because the artists themselves are the most credible proof of what a venue is. Power 105.1 put the series in front of the right regional audience on radio. Digital out-of-home covered the approach routes and commuter corridors, reinforcing the twenty-minutes-from-Manhattan proposition at the moment it was most useful.

Grassroots activity worked the local and community layer that paid media reaches last.

The result

More than 1.6 million campaign impressions established the rebranded venue and its concert programming across the New York and New Jersey market.

The launch positioned Sports Illustrated Stadium as a serious large-scale music venue in one of the most competitive markets in the country.