Hockeyland

A Hockey Adventure in Minecraft & supporting campaign

Insights indicated that audiences for NHL hockey were steadily aging year over year. With this in mind, our Innovation and Engagement team at Sportsnet was tasked with seeding hockey fandom in Gen Z and Generation Alpha.

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With this business objective in mind, we sought to identify the space where we could meet young audiences where they like to play: games. We brazenly set out to build something we had never done, an adventure map within the massive multiplayer online game of Minecraft. Minecraft is highly popular among males and females ages 6-17 with over 140 million monthly users and an average of 3 million users online at any given time. It’s also a very creative adventure game, making it a great contact point to find players who may know very little about the game of hockey. “We are not just assuming that every Canadian is going to grow up being a hockey fan as some kind of birthright," said Director Hilding Gnanapragasam who discussed our intentions further in an article for Strategy.

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For this project, I lead our internal team and worked with our third party vendors through the development, publishing and marketing of Hockeyland. 

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For the campaign, we tapped our SN YouTube creators, Steve Dangle and Graviteh to promote and tour the game, we created aMobile AR tour, DOoH, CTV ads on Sportsnet Now, and an in-broadcast AR set integration which featured a zamboni crashing through a block wall into the NHL on SN set. 

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Hockeyland won Gold at the 2023 Promax North America Awards in the Digital & Social category for Technical Innovation: Digital Platforms.

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