The Sunshine Tour is a membership organisation of professional golfers in Southern Africa that runs and manages professional golf. The Tour is one of the six leading men’s tours that make up the International Federation of PGA Tours, which includes the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour, the Japan Golf Tour, the PGA Tour of Australasia and the Asian Tour.
Over the years the Sunshine Tour has produced some iconic players such as Gary Player, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen all of whom have won multiple Majors. Currently there are a number of players who have ‘graduated’ from the Sunshine Tour to play on the PGA Tour, players like Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Garrick Higgo and Erik Van Rooyen.
Despite this impressive performance; attendance and viewership numbers were declining post COVID and Octagon were tasked to rebrand, refresh and create a campaign that would inspire the next generation of golfers and fans – get them to embrace the Tour and its players.
To achieve this, Octagon created a campaign called “Greatness Begins Here” that spoke to the rich history of the Tour yet kept the future in view. We used past and present players to ‘tell the story’ of what makes the Sunshine Tour great via a number of content pieces created for broadcast and social media, that highlighted multiple achievements of the Tour and its players. We created a new CI/logo for the tour that would appeal to a younger, more diverse audience and spoke to them on platforms that the Tour had never used before.
As a result, we were able to achieve some impressive numbers, with the campaign generating over R100 million in brand exposure; Sunshine Tour events were watched in over 515 million households around the world; social media reach was up 108% year on year; and we achieved over one billion social media impressions globally in one calendar year!
Both the Sunshine Tour and Octagon have won multiple awards for the campaign, which is now in its fifth year. SuperSport, the biggest sports broadcaster on the African continent, also recognized the work with the following statement by SuperSport CEO, Marc Jury ;
“It is refreshing to see a sporting body in South Africa create a campaign that promotes their sport, profiles their players and helps drive viewers to our channel. The #GreatnessBeginsHere campaign has profiled the success of the Tour and told the story of how it’s players manage to achieve success across the globe and at the highest level. We are proud to partner with the Tour to tell these stories and showcase their sport.”