MasonsMedia

Building the game plan for growth

Ottawa Senators Hockey Club

After the excitement of the Ottawa Senators’ first playoff appearance in nine years, the 2025/26 season brought a new challenge: sustaining demand through the natural highs and lows of an NHL season.

Media StrategyMedia Planning & BuyingPerformance MediaAudience Strategy

Results

A full season of testing, learning, and optimizing delivered measurable growth.
ROAS from November to season end
+ %
Blended ROAS
x
Revenue vs. 2023/24
+ %

Challenge

Coming off a playoff year meant 2025/26 had a high bar to clear. Demand naturally shifted with the standings, schedule, and competing events, while some months offered far fewer home games to promote.

With multiple games, ticketing products, and audiences in market at once, the challenge was to keep demand strong throughout the season, rather than relying on individual matchups to do all the heavy lifting.

Insight

Fans aren’t just choosing a game. They’re choosing a reason to go. Audience research showed that for many fans, the decision starts with the occasion: a night out, a family outing, or simply a reason to get together.

Campaign results backed that up. In a December suites test, price-led creative outperformed matchup-led creative, while results across Upcoming Games and Theme Nights showed that giving fans a compelling reason to attend could be just as important as who was on the ice.

Solution

As part of a broader engagement with our sister agency, Acart, we managed paid media throughout the season, giving always-on campaigns time to learn and optimize, focusing spend on high-intent fans ready to buy, and using Theme Nights to connect with lighter fans through interests beyond hockey. As the playoff race heated up, video-supported marquee games and Season Seats campaigns helped build momentum.

We put those learnings to work for 2026/27, evolving the strategy around four focused pillars that group games by why fans want to be there: Biggest Matchups, Best Weekend Games, Best Value Games, and Best Night Out.

With clearer roles for every channel and 42% of the media budget dedicated to creating demand, the strategy is built to keep learning, optimizing, and improving. Because a good game plan doesn’t stay the same. It gets better with every play.
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