"We were the lead on Sportscenter!"

Never could I have imagined that one of my most exhilarating professional experiences would occur at a golf course in Fort Worth, TX. It did and it culminated with the moment below (or via this link if the video is removed):

A little background: our team just returned to New York after a nine-day stretch at The Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth. The storied club hosts one of the longest-running PGA Tour events.

A little over a year ago our client, Charles Schwab, took over the title sponsorship of the event. After we helped rebrand it the Charles Schwab Challenge, they gave us the challenge: “how would you reinvent a golf sponsorship?”

It was a huge opportunity for our company and I think we were able to do some fantastic work in partnership with our clients.

We started with the idea that Charles Schwab was founded in 1973 as a challenger to Wall Street. We wanted to find ways to meld Schwab’s status as a ‘challenger brand,’ the company’s long-term commitment to golf, and its increasing presence in the Dallas/Fort Worth community.

From there, we were able to create dozens of ways for fans at home and fans on the course to experience a new type of tournament. These are three of my favorites:

Throwback Thursday. We created the first ever Throwback Thursday on the PGA Tour. Leaning into the company’s founding in the 70’s we encouraged fans to dress in throwback gear. If they did, they received 73% off concessions. We had hundreds of folks dressed in throwback gear, from trucker hats to bellbottoms, including our whole team:

18 caddy videos. If you are a golf fan at home, watching the commercial breaks over a weekend of play can be tedious. Most brands do 1–2 spots and play them to death every weekend. We thought it would be interesting to give fans a greater variety of content and connect it to Schwab’s sponsorship.

We created 18 spots — one for each hold of the tournament — featuring a caddy giving advice on how to play that hole. Good caddy advice…good Schwab advice…you get it.

While they played digitally and on television, my favorite was how we incorporated them into an interactive course map.

1973 Challenger. We wanted to reinvigorate prizing in golf. Of course the winner gets a big check and an elegant trophy, but we hoped to create a new type of prize. One that is “Instagram-worthy.”

Since Schwab was founded as a challenger brand in 1973, we thought what would be better than paying homage its founding. As such, to the winner we awarded a hand-built resto-mod 1973 Dodge Challenger. We knew we couldn’t build an epic car ourselves so we partnered with Steve Strope (multiple-time SEMA winner who built all of the muscle cars in the Fast and The Furious movies.)

This is how we introduced it during coverage of the final round on CBS:

This is the 12-minute car show that documents the build. (It’s long but I promise it’s worth your time.):

We had the car on display the whole week and the club estimates that 75% of attendees took some sort of photo with and/or around the car. Worthy of the ‘gram for sure.

My favorite moment was when Kevin Na’s final putt dropped to win the tournament. Well, just check out this thread for what happened next. Here's my favorite part:

With that, we had our Sportscenter moment (and our CBS This Morning moment, our #1 Twitter trending topic moment, and so on).

A few days removed, I feel so thankful to our incredibly brave clients and our fantastically creative and hard-working team. And I can’t wait for Memorial Day 2020 in Fort Worth!