New HPSNZ marketing campaign aims to benefit NSOs and athletes

The ‘always on’ campaign began this month and will see outstanding athlete and team achievements in world championships, world cups and other pinnacle events for their sport, brought to life from week to week on digital billboards, in social media as well as the HPSNZ website. The campaign aims to reach a wide adult and youth audience who don’t know how well Kiwi athletes, especially the individuals, are doing overseas.

“The creative concept is ‘Say it proud’ where we will use a range of popular Kiwi words or phrases to congratulate athletes on their performances, along with an image of the athlete or team,” says Sport New Zealand Group Head of Marketing and Communications Kelley Toy.

“We’ve tested it with adults and young people, who both rated it highly for the ‘inspiring’ factor and it resonated strongly with the younger audience.”

The campaign’s first creative execution (pictured below) featured mountain biker, Sammie Maxwell, who won a silver medal at the recent Mountain Bike World Championships, Cross Country.

“It’s a dynamic campaign, where we use a customised digital platform to develop advertisements in-house that connect directly to a network of digital billboards nationwide. We can also vary where the billboards appear throughout the country from week to week,” says Kelley.

As well as its overall goal to engage more New Zealanders in high performance sport, the campaign has been designed to create value for NSOs and athletes.

“We’re delighted with the response of NSOs to date. They have all been incredibly eager to participate,” HPSNZ Strategic Communications Manager Simon Roche says.

“The NSOs we’ve spoken to tell us they grapple with fan engagement but have limited, if any, resources to showcase the success of their athletes widely and engage an audience beyond their own membership or fan base. They see this as an opportunity to be involved in something bigger than they could do themselves.”

While the hero of this campaign will always be the athlete or team, the NSO’s brand will also feature in the advertisements and HPSNZ will collaborate with NSOs, and potentially athletes, to amplify the campaign through social media.

“For athletes, building their brand is increasingly important, and we see this as an opportunity to help them do that by working with their NSOs and heroing their achievements in ways they couldn’t do themselves,” Simon says.

HPSNZ is also collaborating with NSOs to try and help them gain more mainstream media coverage for their athletes.

“The campaign and earned media support, are designed to help combat various issues, such as the reduced number of journalists covering sport, and a predominant focus on team sports in the media,” says Simon.

“Add to that the fact that younger audiences are increasingly disengaging from traditional sports-centric media and young fans today are accustomed to digital content, with short, bite-sized moments being key to capturing their attention, and you can clearly see the rationale for where we are going with this campaign.”

The campaign will run until the end of June 2026.