Sun Life × Raptors — Year 4 Campaign

Overview

Sun Life has been the Toronto Raptors' jersey patch sponsor since the partnership launched — one of the most visible brand placements in Canadian sports. Year 4 meant inheriting a campaign with proven assets, rising efficiency expectations, and a mandate to evolve rather than rebuild. The full-season campaign ran from October 2025 through April 2026, spanning paid social, streaming, broadcast, audio, OOH, in-arena, and digital.

My Role

I was part of the core creative team responsible for developing and delivering the campaign, working closely with the Creative Director on concept development and stakeholder review. I developed the concepts and scripted both OLV executions, and my focus extended to cross-functional coordination — keeping creative direction aligned across the internal brand and partnerships teams and external production and media partners — and on the production pipeline, including the modular asset strategy that shaped how work was built and adapted across channels.

Challenge

The brief asked us to evolve a campaign that was already working — which is a harder creative problem than starting from scratch. Year 3 had strong brand recall and healthy media equivalency, so the pressure was to improve efficiency and deepen emotional resonance without discarding what was already performing.

The operational challenge was the complexity of the stakeholder environment. The campaign runs across a large partner ecosystem — MLSE, Havas, multiple internal business units — with feedback flowing from many directions simultaneously. Keeping creative direction coherent while managing that volume of input requires active process design, not just good creative instincts.

Approach

We started with a structured creative audit of Year 3 assets — what to carry forward, what to evolve, and what to retire. The data pointed clearly toward platform-differentiated creative over a single hero asset. Rather than produce one OLV and adapt it across channels, we developed two distinct spots optimized for different platform contexts and audience moments. The campaign also extended to broadcast, including a TV commercial and brand integrations throughout the season.

A key part of our approach was building the campaign around a modular asset library rather than a fixed set of deliverables. Working closely with our production partners, we developed a robust bank of photo and video — shot and organized so that assets could be mixed, adapted, and extended throughout the season without going back into production. This gave us the flexibility to respond to campaign performance data and platform-specific opportunities in real time rather than being locked into a fixed asset slate from day one.

TikTok was a new channel in Year 4 and significantly overdelivered relative to projections; the audience responded to content that felt native rather than repurposed. That learning, alongside the modular model, directly informed how we framed the brief for Year 5.

Outcome

The campaign exceeded impression, engagement, and site visit targets while coming in meaningfully below prior year spend — the most cost-efficient campaign in the partnership's history. Media equivalency value grew significantly year-over-year, with the jersey patch continuing to drive the majority of that value.