MLS Team Generates $426k in Ticket Sales with CTV Campaign

A Major League Soccer team partnered with Strategus to run ad campaigns focused on driving ticket sales for matches. The campaigns required custom setup and separate pushes for season tickets, individual matches, and playoffs, with customized targeting for each phase. The campaign leveraged connected TV (CTV) ads with Strategus’ proprietary Encore Cross Device Retargeting strategy to serve additional online video and display ads.

Objective

Generate ticket sales for →

• Regular Season
• Playoffs      
• Season Tickets

Strategy

Each campaign was set up individually to drive ticket sales for each regular season and playoff match which demanded quick, custom setup and launch by the Strategus team. The audience targeting focused on English and Spanish-speaking households, soccer fans (including MLS, FIFA/World Cup, and specific professional teams’ fans), and frequent sporting event goers or family activities. Further, the client provided past customer data lists in order to target exact households of past season members, multi-ticket purchases, and single-ticket purchases. Creating look-alike audiences of these first-party data lists expanded the reach to find similar families.

Geo-targeting was refined with heat maps to target the top 61 high-converting ZIP codes instead of the entire DMA, and Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) ads were specifically used for the playoff matches to flood the desired geo with ads. Attribution offerings included post-view website visit tracking, Search & Social Influence, and online purchase tracking through SeatGeek. These campaigns generated $426k in ticket sales for one regular season game and one playoff match.