Selling a main event.

PPV is brutal economics — a single weekend window, a hard ceiling on the audience, and creative fatigue from years of the same fight-promo template.

UFC Canada wanted to test whether a different creative approach — more cinematic, less spec-sheet — could pull casual fans into pay-per-view conversion at scale. They needed an agency willing to break format and a measurement plan strict enough to prove it worked.

We rebuilt the campaign creative system around three character archetypes — the hometown hero, the comeback story, and the rivalry — and shot a 12-asset library in 48 hours during fight week prep.

Paid media ran a deliberate audience expansion: away from the saturated combat-sports interest set, into broader entertainment, podcasting, and Saturday-night sports lookalikes. The measurement spine was incrementality-tested via geo holdouts in three provinces, so the team could prove the campaign caused PPV purchase rather than correlated with it.

CPA on PPV purchase events came in 38% lower than the prior year's campaign at higher spend. Cold-audience video completion rate rose 72%.

The geo-incrementality test attributed 1.9× of the spend back in incremental PPV revenue — a clean, defensible number that landed UFC Canada a bigger media budget for the following card. The creative system has since been licensed back to the parent org for use in additional regional markets.