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Go birds… wait I mean -

Over the summer of 2022, I worked as a copywriting intern for Tierney in Center City. During my time there I had my client work - mostly Xfinity and some TD Bank - and an ongoing intern project. The task was to work with other interns across departments and disciplines to develop and pitch a campaign for the Phillies.

The Ask: increase ticket sales amongst a Gen Z audience that is growing less and less interested in baseball.

At the time I wasn’t really a Phillies fan. Or even much of a sports fan (my dad played Addams Family reruns instead of the Sunday Football game). But one thing about living in Philadelphia is that sports obsession rubs off on you. You just can’t help yourself but shout GO BIRDS at strangers on any given Sunday during football season. But I felt that the Phillies didn’t really have that. Sure they have “Go Phils”, but that’s no unifying rallying cry. And you can throw all sorts of tactic vomit at the wall about things that will excite Gen Z (and oh did people do that) but at the end of the day, Gen Z is searching for community and inclusivity. They want an enviroment to get together, have fun, and share an experience. So what better way to engender love for the Phillies in our cohort than to create our very own rallying cry?

And so, The Phamily was created.

As we dive in, I’ll note that I did all the copy and design for everything you see. Except the deck. I did not make the deck look like that.

So why The Phamily? It’s not insanely inspired. Maybe it even seems a little obvious. Well, my first response to these self critiques is that I think sometimes the best advertising and branding is the thing that makes you think “duh, why wasn’t that always a thing?” And for The Phamily, it kind of was. There was some Phamily stuff floating around out there before our campaign, but nothing unified, and I felt we could use some of this borrowed interest to bring everything together into one brand voice.

Secondly, The Phamily works for a lot of different audiences. Obviously, it works for families, which are a large proportion of the Phillies audience. But it also works for this Gen Z audience that wants something to rally behind. Can’t you just immediately imagine two groups of frat boys encountering each other at a tailgait and shouting, “AYYY IT”S THE PHAMILY” at each other in think Sopranos accents? Or walking down the street of center city and someone daps you up and says “Go Pham” because you’re wearing a Phillies jersey? To me, it just works.

From there, we wanted to position the stadium as the home base of the Phamily, since ultimately the goal was to get people there and sell tickets. Here’s what we came up with by way of advertising materials.

Those are the assets. Not being a designer (and not having one on the team) I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. I think the copy is pretty fun too. And listen, dear reader - I know you’re busy but if you feel like diving more into our reasoning , here’s our pitch deck.

The outcome

We ended up pitching to a couple people from the Phillies Front Office: EVP David Buck, VP of Marketing Mike Harris, and the Director of Brand Marketing Carolyn Saveri. We won the pitch.

Since it’s my portfolio it’s bragging time: David Buck said the pitch was better than most pitches he’s seen from people twice our age. My boss’s boss told me it was one of the best pitches he’s seen during his entire time in advertising.

Since I’m a realist, it’s reverse bragging time. Some of the feedback we received was that they don’t love the word “family.” They don’t want to be seen as just the “family friendly organization.” They did find a lot of our insights interesting and some of the fandom research I had done, and said they would look into the concept of naming a fanbase.