Dicks Sporting Goods Inc.

Dick’s Sporting Goods is the largest American sporting goods retailer, offering a wide range of athletic apparel and outdoor gear. Alongside its retail business, DSG has two in-house lifestyle brands, CALIA and VRST.

At Publicis, my team of four was challenged to develop a holiday campaign for DSG and work directly with the brand team. The guidelines? No budget, no brief, and no set deliverables. In other words, the sky was the limit.

Develop a holiday campaign pitch that builds on an existing strategic campaign while expanding its reach to new growth audiences.

Go beyond the ask and create ready-to-launch deliverables that could bring the campaign to life if it needed to launch tomorrow.

Create a detailed ESOP that leverages diverse media channels while delivering clear ROI on every media dollar spent.

1. Building the Brief – Before beginning campaign ideation, we did what any good creative strategist should do first: identify the problem through research. We started by connecting with the DSG brand team and learned that the brand was struggling to connect with younger audiences beyond traditional athlete demographics. From there, we conducted three separate competitive analyses across media and social intelligence for DSG, CALIA, and VRST using Pathmatics. We then worked with the DSG sponsorship team to evaluate previous Want It, Got It campaigns and identify the key growth audiences the company wanted to reach. This also helped us determine which holidays presented the strongest opportunities to connect with each audience. Finally, using GWI, we built consumer personas for each growth audience. We brought these insights together to develop a creative brief that served as the foundation for the campaign.

2. Crafting the Campaign – With our three growth audiences identified, we used the brief to build on the previous Want It, Got It Ariana Grande campaign. We saw the winter holiday season as an opportunity to create a more emotional connection with key non-athletic growth segments, while using a Gen Z icon to deliver the message. From there, we identified opportunities across earned, shared, owned, and paid channels through an ESOP strategy aligned with the Feeling Cozy All Winter Round campaign. This approach also created opportunities to amplify CALIA and VRST products throughout the campaign.

3. Delivering the Message – Once the campaign strategy was finalized, our team went beyond the initial ask and developed the materials needed to bring the idea to life. This included scripts for creative ad spots, moodboards, a detailed media plan, a budget tracker, product placement proposals, an influencer activation plan and cost breakdown, competitive analyses, and a full campaign walkthrough. We also partnered with the Publicis Groupe new business team to bring the presentation to life, creating an engaging pitch experience that included campaign themed cupcakes, a printed program, and QR codes.

Over six weeks with no creative restrictions, our team used the holiday campaign challenge as an opportunity to develop work that was both creatively ambitious and deeply rooted in data and ROI. Every creative asset was built around Ariana Grande while staying aligned with DSG's brand objectives. At the same time, the campaign opened the door to new growth audiences and broader brand goals.

Our work was ultimately recognized by our Senior Vice President and shared with the broader company. The project also had an impact beyond the original pitch, with the Haleon Publicis team incorporating our influencer activation plan and product integration proposals for Advil and Tums.