Christopher A. Ritter’s Chicago Cubs campaign lets fans fill the blank

When Christopher A. Ritter joined the team developing the Chicago Cubs’ ticket-sales campaign, the brief was a single slide. A photograph of the bleachers with three words underneath: ‘Get butts here.’ MLB campaigns tend to lean on the roster, which works when the team’s superstars are delivering, but makes the campaign vulnerable the moment on-field performance slips. As a result, Ritter and the team treated the brief as licence to look elsewhere. Elsewhere meant Wrigley Field. The Chicago Cubs play on the city’s North Side at one of the most recognisable stadiums in North American sport, and the season campaign for ticket sales runs across the city, in-stadium media and digital channels. Ritter, an independent creative director who worked alongside three other creative directors on the project, was leading the visual system while they focused on copy. The platform they landed on, [THIS] is Everything, points at the experience of being at Wrigley and invites fans to fill in the blank with their own version of it. “The Cubs already possess one of the strongest in-person emotional experiences in Major League Baseball,” Ritter tells us. The opportunity, as he frames it, sat in marketing the feeling of being at Wrigley Field. The argument is partly strategic – a campaign anchored to atmosphere holds up across winning and losing seasons – and partly a recognition of what fans already return for. The ivy, day baseball, the seventh inning stretch, the neighbourhood around the stadium, the strangers in adjacent seats.