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The Home Depot:
Tool Shaq

To increase The Home Depot’s sports sponsorship efforts across both men’s and women’s sports, Octagon secured a new partnership with the NCAA across its Men’s and Women’s National Championships. 

When The Home Depot asked Octagon to create an experience for their inaugural “Tips From The Tool Shaq” campaign during NCAA March Madness in 2024, we knew we had to think big… Shaquille O’Neal big. So, our team set out to create a space during both the Men’s and Women’s NCAA Tournaments that would let fans step into Shaq’s oversized world.

The Tool Shaq Experience was designed off the punny humor of The Tool Shaq media campaign, merging DIY themes and basketball together through five key touchpoints:

  1. “How to Seed a Bracket”: The world’s first living bracket, made with over 6,000 team-colored live roses from The Home Depot, served as a massive photo opportunity for fans entering the space. The bracket was updated overnight as teams progressed throughout the men’s and women’s tournaments.
  2. “How to Work the Paint”: A kid-friendly arts and crafts area drafting off The Home Depot’s wildly popular Kids Workshops, which allowed fans to design their own Final Four wooden court magnet to take home.
  3. “Shaq’s Shooting Drills”: A DIY-inspired version of around-the-world, where fans shot basketballs from drill-bit-inspired pedestals for prizes like “Phil The Bucket Hats.”
  4. “The Big Dance Off”: An AR-powered dance booth that let fans try to beat Shaq in a dance off, featuring the famous Shaq Shimmy.
  5. “Bucket Ball”: A game of pop-a-shot using Home Depot Buckets as hoops, hosted by the campaign’s mascot “Phil The Bucket.”

We wanted fans to feel like they were entering a space that Shaq had created himself, so we included Shaq details and easter eggs throughout, like “How to shoot a free throw” diagrams at the experience entrance, alongside broken and mangled basketball rims that Shaq was “fixing” in his shop. All live elements were native to each tournament’s host city, with succulents and desert plants in Phoenix and flowering deciduous plants in Cleveland. By using real lumber for the build, the space even smelled like an active workshop.

In total, we hosted 200,000 fans over 15 days at the Men’s and Women’s Final Four, distributing over 20,000 premium items along the way. In a world filled with flashy, high-tech activations, we built something that fans could touch, smell, paint, and help create with us – with a little help from the Big Man.