Strategies for bold marketing campaign, Hannah Warren

In this Sports Geek Throwback episode, Sean Callanan interviews Hannah Warren from episode 392

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Key Takeaways

In this Sports Geek Throwback, Hannah and Sean discusses:

The “We Are Here” campaign emphasised netball's unique position as a sport built by women for women, with the powerful message “They said you play a game for little girls. So we showed them what little girls can do.”
Netball Australia worked with TLA Wildcard to develop a campaign that would resonate across their entire ecosystem, from grassroots to the elite Diamonds squad.
The strategy extended beyond the initial launch by focusing on athlete storytelling and creating an internal news engine to maintain momentum.
The organisation brought in media expertise, including former News Corp Chief of Staff Erin Lyons, to enhance their editorial approach to the Suncorp Super Netball competition.
The campaign influenced all touchpoints, from merchandise to event presentation for finals series, creating a cohesive brand experience

Throwback Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited by AI

Sean: And so, you launched the We Are Here campaign and you go through that process of getting buy-in, you launch that initial creative and those storytelling threads and you get that big push. Everyone gets behind it at launch and there's a lot of back slapping and everyone going way to go Hannah.

And that's what a brand launch is. But then I'm really interested in how do you go from that brand launch every day? That's amazing. Look at the new season too. How do you then keep that brand strategy going after the launch?

Hannah: Great question. Yes, the big bang and then what have you got? That's where sports great because sport will throw curve balls and stories. And that's where you can start leaning into all of the individual athlete stories, the journey that the clubs are about to go on. I certainly got a lot of backslapping, but I by no means did this alone. We work with the amazing kids at TLA wildcard. Shout out to them. Absolutely great operators and my team also.

Head of Design, Head of Creative, Justin Bedford and the whole team. Absolutely phenomenal job. Firstly, I do have to call out that this was not of my own device completely. Lots and lots of hands went into that. I think one of the amazing things we've had join the team is Erin Lyons, an ex Chief of Staff for News Corp. And Erin understands what a hook is.

And so it's been phenomenal to watch that team really start to drive the editorial of Suncorp Super Netball, which we hadn't previously focused on well enough, in my opinion. We need to start telling athletes stories and creating our own news engine. And we'd been very good in previous years to tell the story of what happens on court in New South Wales, Swift's beat the West coast fever by two points and this shooter had these stats and that all has its place, absolutely. But what are the stories behind all of that? And we all know the sports trends that fans are following athletes far more than they're following clubs.

So we have to start moving with that and telling those stories. And we have to start making sure that if we've set the brand platform, how do all of the touch points for Suncorp Super Netball continue to elevate and speak to that? So that's not just the brand team as well. That's our incredible events and operations team who all took the brief of we are here and said, okay, we get that. How does that roll out across sports pres for the final series? How does that inform what our merch range looks like?

How does that inform, there's so many other pieces of the puzzle that keep it moving and keep it alive after you've had that initial kind of sugar rush of the campaign's here. It's a stake in the ground. This is amazing.