Spirit is Everything

The latest Maple Leafs marketing campaign has been all over the airwaves for the last month (if you haven't seen the ads, the short version is viewable here). Interspersed with vintage clips of the Leafs, fans of all generations and all backgrounds share memories of their favourite goals. Their play-by-play recaps capture how the dramatic tension of on-ice action carries the fan on a slow-building crescendo from hopeful anticipation to full-bore celebration. With barely any actual clips of gameplay, the commercials are all about how, for the most part, the fan's experience occurs away from the game in conversation, water-cooler debate, and reminiscences of better days. As Lance Martin, the creative director at TAXI 2—an offshoot of TAXI, the always interesting agency—puts it, "the Leafs are a huge part of what it means to be Torontonian." And the nostalgia-tinged campaign is meant to ignite the passion and spirit Torontonians feel for their team. In this, it's the perfect marketing campaign to help fans weather the disappointment of what will likely be another losing season. On the other hand, the campaign's lack of a strong web presence limits how far it can reach.

A little tug on nostalgic heart-strings is a sure-fire way of linking sports fandom to a broader sense of community. And the ads solidify Leaf fandom as a life-long commitment that no Johnny-come-lately expansion franchise could dislodge, should the rumours of a second NHL franchise in Toronto ever come true.

On the other hand, concentrating on past glories during another long and luckless season might draw the attention of fans—especially those Torontonians who've already been hardened into cynicism by the exorbitantly high price of tickets—to the fact that over the last forty years such glories have been few and far between. If "Spirit is Everything," as the ads intone, then surely the flip-side is that "Winning is Secondary." Then again, as fans of any perennially losing sports team can attest, season after season of bitter disappointment makes the rare moments of jubilation that much sweeter—and their memory more tightly held.

"Reinvigorating the relationship between the team and the fans," says Jeremy Gayton, TAXI 2's VP and general manager, "was an objective we (and the Leafs) took very seriously." If that was the intention, a more proactive web presence would have moved it beyond being a mere brand loyalty campaign limited to TV and radio spots, transit posters, and billboards. The commercials are the perfect opportunity to provoke debate and online participation through a season-long countdown of the greatest goals. Yet there's no outlet for this sort of debate on the Leafs website—even its associated Leafspace for fan-generated content seems less organized than the more integrated efforts on other teams' websites. For fans, the debate could be the perfect distraction from another inevitable third period meltdown. Or maybe it's a moot point since everyone knows the best Leafs goal was that Nikolai Borschevsky overtime winner in 1993.

Screencap from TAXI 2's Maple Leafs Campaign.