RBC Training Ground
Challenge
As the longest standing partner of the Canadian Olympic Committee (Team Canada), RBC had traditionally leveraged the partnership during Olympic window every two years to showcase its brand, products/services and its support of athletes to Canadians . To further realize partnership value and to fill an existing gap in next generation athlete recruitment and support, it introduced ‘Training Ground’. At its core, RBC Training Ground is an athlete identification program for youth ages 14-25 and is designed to fuel Team Canada’s Olympic pipeline while providing consistent marketing opportunities and attribution for RBC.
Strategy and Solutions
RBC Training Ground is built on an annual cycle of key marketing opportunities and moments in Canadian sport. Beginning with a recruitment window, RBC leverages content captured throughout the year and, with help from its roster of RBC Olympians, aims to drive brand affinity and program signups for qualifying events happening across the country through targeted marketing campaigns. With Olympians and partnered sport organizations present, we’ve designed each qualifying event to test the athletes and fill our social calendar.
When qualifying events wrap, sport partners nominate the top 100 athletes for the RBC Training Ground National Final; a three-day event we’ve designed to provide athletes with an experience fit for Olympians. The RBC Training Ground National Final serves two purposes: To put athletes to the test with an opportunity to land one of 30 spots each year as an ‘RBC Future Olympian’ whereby athletes are placed with a National Sport partner and provided the funding and support required to train in hopes of one day competing on the Olympic stage. As a content factory to support the upcoming marketing calendar. Following the 2022 RBC Training Ground National Final, we produced 45 unique pieces of content focused on amateur and professional athletes in support of paid and organic social campaigns. In just 8 years, 13 RBC Training Ground athletes have gone on to compete at the Olympics, with 7 of them finishing on the podium taking home 2 Gold, 1 Silver and 4 bronze medals across a variety of individual and team sports.
RBC x Music
Challenge
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) needed help bringing its music sponsorship platform to life in a way that not only connected with music fans, but provided meaningful support to the artist community. Historically, this platform was positioned as a tactical rewards program tied to live music events. But with the world in lockdown due to the pandemic, RBC had to find a new way to support the music industry – one that wasn’t directly tied to live music experiences.
Strategy and Solutions
Partnering with award winning artist H.E.R. alongside seven up-andcoming artists, we built creative that drove awareness of First Up by allowing these artists to tell their stories to inspire a generation to find and share their own voices. We launched this platform during music’s biggest night, putting our artists on the biggest stage they’d ever been on, the Grammy’s. Our message was then shared across 80 pieces of custom content designed to flood the social channels of our core audience.
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