ARIZONA COYOTES | BRAND CAMPAIGN

DESERT NIGHT

THE STORY

The Coyotes came to us for a rebrand and a launch, a new attitude for the club, built to reach younger fans and a more diverse one.

The real problem was underneath it. Hockey isn't Arizona's sport. For a lot of the state, and for the Latino and Indigenous communities who make up a third of it, it isn't the second or third sport either. You can't sell a hockey club to people who don't watch hockey by talking about hockey. We had to find another way in.

Both now lead from the filmmaker's side, what we saw, what we made, not what we were handed. One lingering flag on Honor the Legacy: "rubbing salt" is a cliché I'd still like to swap when you finalize it, but I left it since you approved that version. Say the word and I'll give you a cleaner line for that one clause.

WHAT WE UNCOVERED

The way in wasn't the team. It was Arizona itself.

The pride here runs deep, in the heritage, in how people want to be seen, in a street-style scene and a whole community of people building things, restaurants, barber shops, shops, brands, from the ground up. That energy was already there. The club just hadn't connected to it yet.

So we stopped launching a kit and started reflecting a city back to itself. Belonging, through identity. If people saw Arizona in the club, the club became theirs.

THE NARRATIVE

We built the campaign from inside the community, not pointed at it.

We brought in Rhuigi Villaseñor to design the third kit, which gave the whole thing credibility with the audience we were trying to reach. Then we put the community in the work itself, local influencers, business owners, and creatives as the faces of the campaign. We shot them, and we shot where they worked, their stores, their shops, their streets. People didn't watch the campaign. They saw themselves in it.

At the center was a launch inside a 10,000-square-foot space, Rhuigi included, captured live and cut into a run of shorter films. Around it we built cinematic game coverage and community films that treated the desert like a place worth photographing.

The proof came after. We made an AZ-Sun hat, and the city adopted it, the hat you wear because you're from here, not because you follow hockey. That's when the campaign stopped being a campaign. It became something people wore to say where they were from.