A new brand campaign for the National Bank Open broadens the scope to position Canada’s marquee tennis events as cultural and social happenings, with elite athleticism at their core.

Nathalie Tremblay, VP of marketing strategy and customer experience at Tennis Canada, tells strategy that Sid Lee’s reimagined brand identity for the WTA and ATP events aims to attract audiences looking for social and entertainment experiences beyond centre court.

While marketing for the National Bank Open typically centres on player profiles throughout the year, a series of 15-second films at the centre of the “Welcome to the Tennis Playground” campaign portray slice-of-life moments in an attempt to relate more to the casual fan.

With the tournament expanding to a new 12-day format with a larger 96-player singles main draw, Tennis Canada is using the opportunity to appeal to new fans.

“Our campaign is really quite focused on increasing our market share amongst the younger demographic that is a little bit more tied to the entertainment value for these types of events,” Tremblay says. “It’s really focusing, obviously, always on the sales activation, which is essentially based around the product itself and players and the prestige of these world-class athletes, but also brand building.”

Tremblay says the creative and marketing teams were agile in their budgeting for this year’s work, creating a unified campaign to play in both of the National Bank Open’s host cities. In past years, campaigns were developed for both Toronto and Montreal, but with the gap in support for the women’s and men’s games receding, the need to create separate creative for each has evaporated, according to Tremblay.

This year, Montreal will play host the women’s tournament at IGA Stadium and Toronto welcomes the men to Sobeys Stadium. The player lineup will be announced next week ahead of the events running from July 26 to Aug. 7.

Metrics for success will include ticket sales, awareness and long-term impact on tennis participation in Canada. Tennis Canada has also set a goal to achieve parity in prize money for the men’s and women’s tournaments by 2027.

“We deeply feel that an emotionally based campaign connected obviously with smart-sales activations component will positively influence the perception of tennis and prestigious sports in our markets, and that’s really the long-term play,” Tremblay says. “The tennis-health mission, participation, growth of women in young girls in sports is our primary goal, the success of our high-performance events commercially, but also seeing women gaining equal prize money, is definitely a cornerstone.”

“Welcome to the Tennis Playground” launched Monday with TV, OLV, radio and OOH placements. Digital banner and influencers are also being activated along with “fake out-of-home” AI video stunts that overlay tournament-branded headbands on Montreal and Toronto landmarks.

Sid Lee Media and Omnicom Media Group Montreal are handling the media buys and YPR is working on PR.