The spirit of great hockey starts with the community gathering at the local arena. Kraft Hockeyville is a celebration of communities across Canada, supporting the hockey stars and fans within them.
In November 2011, the award-winning “Kraft Hockeyville” (KHV) program launched its seventh season. With the support of its partners, Kraft Foods Group, the CBC, the National Hockey League (NHL) and the National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA), KHV continues to connect and inspire more communities to show and share their pride for Canada's favourite pastime.
Between Nov. 18, 2011 and Jan. 31, 2012, communities from coast to coast came together and competed to become the next Kraft Hockeyville – “The place where hockey lives in Canada!” Leveraging the power of Kraft’s brands, retail customers, the scale of the NHL, the NHLPA, and Canada’s #1 sports property, CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, the KHV program generated spectacular buzz.
For the first time, the competition introduced early-bird prizing to create an incentive for the public to nominate their community before Dec. 16. Early-bird entries stood the chance of winning $10,000 worth of hockey equipment for their community’s minor hockey association. The program also introduced an enhanced and gammified Krafthockeyville.ca website, where visitors could win branded virtual trophies to be posted on their Facebook pages.
Communities would enter online via KraftHockeyville.ca, which housed all of the program information, previous winners and other branded content.
Kraft reached the consumer at multiple touch points, driving consumption and generating retail excitement through in-store POS. The program secured over 2,800 in-store displays with 100% compliance from all key customers (LCL, Sobey’s and Safeway). The retail activation included signage with signature recipes, snack ideas and active lifestyle tips from Kraft Kitchens to reach the active lifestyle and grassroots sports audience.
In addition, full-page ads ran throughout the year and e-blasts were sent to the Kraft Canada and NHL.com database.
To promote the program on air, nine Kraft Hockeyville-branded promotional spots aired on the CBC as well as a French-language ad on Radio-Canada. The program also received shout-outs from CBC Hockey Night in Canada hosts Ron MacLean and Cassie Campbell-Pascall during the show broadcast, with HNIC's second intermission, Prime Game East, sponsored by KHV and supported by 10- and 30-second vignettes.
Segments featuring five NHL player ambassadors that represented each KHV region aired on TV and were placed online. Cassie Campbell-Pascall was also a guest on CBC’s Steven & Chris where she created a Kraft Hockeyville inspired recipe segment.
A KHV “Live in 5” show featured each of the top five finalist communities and the winner was announced by NHL commissioner Gary Bettman live on Hockey Night in Canada. In addition to being crowned Kraft Hockeyville 2012, Stirling-Rawdon, ON, won an NHL pre-season game as well as $100,000 in arena upgrades (courtesy of Kraft Canada), which was broadcast on Hockey Night in Canada. The four runner-up communities each received $25,000 for arena upgrades from Kraft Canada.
Due to the NHL work stoppage, the pre-season game in Stirling-Rawdon was postponed until fall 2013. However, other community celebrations took place in Stirling-Rawdon on Oct. 1, 2012 – such as an NHL celebrity and alumni hockey game, a Stanley Cup appearance, NHL alumni hockey clinics, NHL alumni autograph session and a community-driven parade.
There was also dedicated event coverage from Stirling-Rawdon (such as video, editorial and blogs), placed on NHL.com/krafthockeyville as well as on the NHL’s social media channels. The program received media coverage during the presentation of the $100,000 cheque to the community for its arena as well as leading up to the NHL alumni game in Stirling-Rawdon. Ron McLean played in the alumni game along with 15 other NHL Alumni, including hometown star Rob Ray.
The program received 227 unique community entries with over 9,000 pieces of content, such as stories and photos, uploaded to the site. Over 17 million votes were cast during the two voting periods to determine the Top finalists as well as the Kraft Hockeyville winning community. This represents the highest number of votes ever for Kraft Hockeyville.
KHV 2012 gained a 39% increase in awareness, and ranked the 4th most recognized national program supporting local communities in Canada. The Facebook pages created by participating communities resulted in 50,000 additional fans. Over 45,000 photos were posted and 28,108 comments were published on Facebook, resulting in 9,359,424 social impressions. The program site received over 34.7 million page views (up 127% year-over-year) and over 6.3 million referrals from Facebook.
Media coverage for KHV continues to produce significant brand awareness with over 161.9 million media impressions and 2,172 stories generated in 2012.
What’s more, participating grocery stores saw an average of 15% in sales for Kraft products.