PBR Teams Rides the Momentum of Out of Home Success

February 20, 2025

One of the very first stories we told here at Brand Central Station was how PBR Teams used out of home advertising to lasso fans in its inaugural season, leveraging the entire OUTFRONT Edge in an impactful campaign that drove ticket sales for its Outlaw Days event in Kansas City. Then last spring, the professional bull riding league enlisted OUTFRONT again to scale that success across seven of its home-team markets.


Like its first campaign, we delivered PBR Teams’ message across not only traditional and digital billboards but mobile devices, computers, tablets and OTT/CTV. Also like the first time, PBR Teams relied on STUDIOS, our in-house creative agency, to handle the design, and our OUTFRONT Mobile team to deliver and retarget the campaign across those connected devices.

Since the brand campaign was scheduled to run during the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournaments, STUDIOS created a March Madness theme that used contextual relevance in order to activate the crossover audience between the two sports, using basketball-themed language to draw a parallel between the excitement of March Madness and that of PBR Teams.

Why use contextual relevance? It’s the proverbial One Weird Trick for lighting up the brain, making campaigns 25% more memorable while also increasing purchase intent and brand favorability (SOURCE: IAS).

Contextual relevance comes in two varieties: ads for products relevant to the moment (like a breakfast sandwich being advertised in the morning) and ads where it’s the creative that’s relevant to the moment (such as ads with dynamic DOOH elements like the current time or temperature). Respectively, they’ve been shown to lift brain response by 12% and 18%. But this campaign hit the juicy sweet spot at the center of that Venn diagram, where brain response increases by 32% (SOURCE: CCO/JCDeCaux UK/Posterscope/Neuro-Insight).

This is why we say that out of home is an art and a science.


Running concurrently with the March Madness creative, additional ads promoted the “8 Seconds in Vegas” giveaway, awarding a grand-prize trip to Sin City for the championship. Since one of the campaign’s goals was introducing the sport to new audiences, this creative was unbranded, focusing the message on the giveaway rather than the giver. This allowed PBR Teams to create engagement outside its existing fan base, opening up a line of owned-channel communication with those who may not have been already familiar with the sport. The one-two punch of the brand campaign and the giveaway sent conversions off the chart – over 50,000 in just ten days (SOURCE: PBR Teams).

At the conclusion of the springtime phase of the campaign, PBR Teams saw a $500,000 improvement in revenue compared to the same day of 2023. Sales overall increased by 35%, indicating that the campaign wasn’t just enticing fans to buy tickets earlier – it was creating new ones, thanks in no small part to a Digital Direct Ad Server (DDA) buy across home team markets of Florida, New York, Nashville, Austin, Kansas City, Dallas, and Phoenix (SOURCE: PBR Teams).

 
That springtime effort planted seeds that would blossom come summertime. In the weeks leading up to the league’s July 12 opening day, we executed another stage of the campaign, complementing digital out of home impressions in home-team markets with proximity targeting and mobile retargeting. Over 9,000 of those exposed to this round of ads attended one of the PBR Teams events (SOURCE: Ground Truth)!

This holistic strategy embraced by PBR Teams is one that live event producers of all kinds can emulate:

• Establish the overall national brand. OOH and CTV can combine effectively to build brand awareness as far as six months out.
• Focus on local audiences and loyalists in feeder markets with location-specific creative approximately three months prior to the event.
• Identify and reach crossover audiences with bespoke creative meant specifically for them.
• Combine OOH and mobile to maximize conversions. Consumers are 48% more likely to click a mobile ad after encountering the same campaign via OOH (SOURCE: Ocean Neuroscience).
• Create urgency in the final month, using dynamic data countdowns to build anticipation, QR codes and special offers to drive conversion, and exclusion targeting to ensure that last-minute impressions aren’t wasted on those previously converted.

Are you ready to saddle up for success? Cowboy up and contact us today!

Author: Jay Fenster, Marketing Manager @ OUTFRONT

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