• by Karl Greenberg , September 4, 2008

The National Hockey League is launching its biggest new-season campaign to date, with four national TV spots and 60 customized regional TV ads, plus a new web site at NHL.com, events and retail activities and branding.

The effort, via Y&R, uses "Is this the year?" as a theme line for the second year in a row. The campaign centers on four national TV ads featuring Henrik Lundqvist of the New York Rangers; NHL Rookie of the Year Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks; Dion Phaneuf of the Calgary Flames and Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins. The ads use green-screen technology to superimpose the players over real game photos of saves, checks, poses, and shots.

"It's a celebration of the game," Brian Jennings, executive vice president of marketing* for the N.Y.-based NHL, tells Marketing Daily. "It's how the league wants to speak to the fans about the hopes, the possibilities and anticipation of the start of the season."

In the spots, which look like still-photos coming to life, the players turn to face the camera and make dramatic statements about the previous year and how they are determined to do even more in the new season. Lundqvist, for example, is shown in an action photo, blocking a goal attempt from the Pittsburgh Penguins. He turns to the camera and says: "Last season, I led the league in shutouts, but that doesn't matter. I don't care that I turned away 1,663 shots. What keeps me up at night is the 160 I didn't."

The ad featuring Crosby shows him posing with members of the Penguins team after the final game of the Stanley Cup Final, which the Penguins didn't win. "This is a tough one," he says, "getting this close and not winning the cup. But I know it'll make our team even stronger. I never want to be in this photograph again."

The six-week campaign is part of the NHL's umbrella campaign, "Live Every Shift." Jennings says the league launched the campaign last year with ads featuring Crosby, Vincent Lecavalier of the Tampa Bay Lightning and Eric Staal of the Carolina Hurricanes. "It was very well-received by fans," he says, adding that the ads were less about the players and more about the coming year. "We definitely wanted to continue that theme."

He says the campaign is aimed at keeping the game top of mind for fans who are probably getting the same pitches from other pro and college sports. "What we are trying to do is be the voice of the fan, and to capture the imagination of the fan; we want to build national scale at a time of the year where there is a lot of competition from football and baseball, so this campaign will run across all of our touchpoints, from buildings to regional and national broadcasts, events and even sporting goods stores," he says.

Jennings says the league has seven major marketing goals this year: executing the "Is This the Year?" launch; redesigning the NHL.com site; the Center Ice campaign, directed at so-called "displaced fans"--team fans who no longer live in their team's hometown; the Winter Classic game, the All Star Game and the Stanley Cup; and an ongoing national tune-in effort to sustain audiences.

He says the push this season will include building online marketing efforts. The new ads will break first on NHL.com, and on social media sites like You Tube, partly because that's where avid hockey fans-- like everyone else--spend their time, and also because the league is reaching out to a younger demographic, he says. "All of our campaigns will launch on NHL.com first. We are putting a real emphasis on NHL.com, where we can serve our fans through videos, highlights and customized, personalized content."

* Editor's note: The story was amended post publication.