The Digital Arena

Happy Friday Sippers,

How was your week?

Are you a hockey fan? Better yet, are you a Montreal Canadiens fan? I am.

From 2005 to 2014, I spent ten amazing years building brands at Molson Coors. When you work in beer in Montreal, you are inherently in the hockey business. I was lucky enough to manage our precious partnership with the Habs on Molson Export (their official beer), which included redoing the Molson Ex Zone at the Bell Centre and working on a massive campaign that never actually saw the light of day.

Under the banners at the Bell Centre. The cathedral where sports, brand history, and pure obsession collide.

For a brand, sponsoring a team is a fantastic opportunity to be stronger by association. But in 2012, I learned the hard way to never link your brand's performance directly to their on-ice performance.

The campaign idea was legendary: If the Habs won the Stanley Cup, Molson Export would give away a case of 24 to every single household in Quebec. 

We shot an incredibly expensive, high-production TV spot featuring a ballet of forklifts dancing around towering walls of beer to create our tagline: On y croit (We believe). We even locked in the ultimate cheer song for the campaign. To pull off the shoot, I practically had to sign away my firstborn to borrow 20,000 physical cases of beer from our warehouse.

During our pitch, the GM at the time, Bob Gainey, looked at us and asked just one question: "What if we lose?"

We scoffed. The Habs were first in the league with a comfortable margin.

And then... the free fall began. Game after game, injuries piled up and the losses mounted. We barely qualified for the playoffs. Every game they lost, I lost a pound in pure stress as we held daily crisis meetings to decide if we could still launch. In the end, we pulled the plug. Going ahead with it would have made us look like we were acting in bad faith.

A $1.0M+ commercial spot was thrown directly into the garbage, alongside a brand-new website and hundreds of hours spent with lawyers trying to figure out how to legally distribute free beer (spoiler alert: it's highly illegal).

Beyond the Scoreboard: 3 Shifts in How Fans Engage Today 📏

My 2012 campaign was a costly lesson in trying to control the game. Today, we don't have to wait for the scoreboard to align before we connect with our audience. The modern arena of fandom is self-sustaining, highly interactive, and constantly active. To capture this energy, brands have to adapt to three new realities:

1. The "Live Moment" is Just the Warm-Up 🏟️

In 2012, if our TV spot didn't air during the live game, our campaign was dead. Today, the live broadcast is just the "on-ramp" to a much larger conversation.

• The Trend | Fans are spending more time with fan-generated content, reactions, breakdowns, and behind-the-scenes footage, than the source material itself. One single broadcast moment on the ice now sparks 1,000 sub-moments online.

• The Brand Lesson | Stop focusing entirely on the 60 minutes of live play. The true, compounding brand affinity lives in the "shoulder content" where fans go to explore and deeply relive their passions.

2. Co-Creation Beats Static Sponsorships 🎨

Our Molson Ex campaign was entirely one-directional: we broadcasted, they watched. Today's fans don't just consume culture; they actively build it.

• The Trend | 65% of Gen Z describe themselves as video content creators. They want to play with, remix, and reimagine the brands they love. Look at how Burger King sponsored Stevenage FC (a tiny, real-world team at the bottom of English football's 4th division) purely because they knew the team would appear in the FIFA video game. By launching the #StevenageChallenge, they invited gamers to play as the team, share their virtual goals wearing the BK logo online, and win real food rewards. They turned a tiny real-life team into the biggest team in digital gaming culture. 

• The Brand Lesson | Give your audience the assets, templates, and permissions to co-create with you. When you let go of absolute control and give fans the tools to play, they build a cultural relevance you could never buy with a static $1M ad spot.

3. Go Beyond the Expected Playbook 🎮

If you are only sponsoring the massive, obvious sports leagues, you are missing where the most passionate communities are forming.

• The Trend | The lines between sports, gaming, and entertainment have completely blurred. Gaming is now mainstream, gaming is as popular as online shopping! Yet, brands consistently under-invest in these hyper-engaged digital spaces.

• The Brand Lesson | Take calculated bets on emerging cultural territories. Just like Commonwealth Bank made a massive, early bet on the Matildas women's soccer team in 2016 when they were still on the fringes, brave brands today are looking at gaming creators and digital franchises to capture early, high-impact loyalty.

The Sip Takeaway 🍷☕🍸

Building a modern brand is inherently uncomfortable because it requires us to do the hardest thing of all: give up absolute control.

If your brand's marketing strategy feels perfectly safe and entirely predictable right now, you aren't building a community, you're just buying ad space. And in a fragmented digital world, attention cannot be bought; it has to be shared.

Align your brand with your audience's passion, trust the tools of co-creation, and embrace the vibrant, unpredictable splash of active fandom.

Stop trying to script the entire game.

Start sharing control with your fanbase

Until then

See you next week.

P.S. Speaking of live-broadcast stress, my beloved Habs are heading into a gruelling second-round matchup against the Buffalo Sabres. It's going to be a tough, hard-fought battle to get past them, but you know where I stand. 

Go Habs Go! 🔵⚪🔴