The conventional wisdom about marketing to hockey fans in Canada has always been that you must genuflect before the altar of the game itself — the ice, the speed, the lifetime devotion that supposedly begins in infancy with a miniature stick placed ceremonially in the crib.
DoorDash, the delivery service that became the NHL's official on-demand delivery partner across Canada and the United States, has taken a different approach. Its new campaign, "What's For Hockey," is aimed squarely at the people in the room who are there for the pizza rather than the power play.
The campaign, created by Broken Heart Love Affair in Toronto, features families lounging on living room furniture that has been placed, improbably, in the middle of an ice rink. Hockey players race around sofas and coffee tables while the families remain serenely focused on their food. A Yorkshire terrier is showered with ice shavings. Evan Bouchard of the Edmonton Oilers crashes through a glass coffee table. (The table was real glass; sugar glass, the team discovered, does not shatter with sufficient conviction.)
"Kudos to our client for pushing us to put families at the center," said Ryan McDonald, who joined the agency in May along with his creative partner, Hayley Wu. Neither describes themselves as a devoted sports fan, which may have been precisely the point.
The production required building multiple living rooms on an Olympic-sized rink in Montreal, a process that began at 4 a.m. on the first day and continued for three days in what Ms. Wu described as "literally an ice box." The families on camera appear comfortable; between takes, they were bundled and shivering.
DoorDash does not work with an agency of record, preferring to assign projects as it sees fit. The company had previously worked with Broken Heart Love Affair on a campaign for women's sports leagues and was pleased with the result — the kind of quiet endorsement that, on Madison Avenue, counts as a standing ovation.
The campaign includes one element generated by artificial intelligence, used to fill an empty patch of ice. It is, the team noted, barely noticeable. Which may be the most honest thing anyone has yet said about AI in advertising.
Original story published in The Drum: "Behind the carefully choreographed chaos of DoorDash’s hockey campaign | The Drum"