TSN and Leo Burnett Toronto built outdoor murals from 15,000 tennis balls at Canadian courts to promote TSN's 2014 US Open coverage, winning D&AD and One Show
TSN Kings and Queens of the Court Turns Tennis Balls Into Billboards
TSN's "Kings and Queens of the Court" is a 2014 Canadian outdoor advertising campaign created by Leo Burnett Toronto that transformed local tennis court fencing and walls into large-scale murals built entirely from 15,000 real tennis balls, promoting TSN's broadcast coverage of the US Open while inviting Canadians to take a branded ball home and play.
The campaign operates at the intersection of recreation, media promotion, and environmental installation. Rather than buying conventional billboard space, Leo Burnett Toronto fabricated an entirely new media space, as documented by Tsn Ca, embedding the campaign directly inside the leisure environment its target audience already inhabited. Three 30-by-12-foot murals, as recorded by commarts.com, were installed at local tennis courts across Canada, each depicting the drama and star power of the US Open tournament. The branded tennis balls were not merely decorative — they were functional, available for members of the public to remove and use, creating a sampling mechanic layered on top of the visual spectacle.
In Canada, the campaign launched in November 2014, timed to sustain awareness of TSN's US Open coverage. The client brief, according to clapboard.com, was straightforward: promote TSN's coverage of the US Open. What Leo Burnett Toronto produced in response was neither a television spot nor a print insertion but a category-blurring outdoor media intervention that earned the campaign recognition from the industry's most selective juries. The concept itself required persistence — according to clapboard.com, the idea took almost two years from inception to execution, underscoring the structural complexity of manufacturing, installing, and distributing 15,000 tennis balls as a cohesive OOH campaign across the Canadian market.
TSN faced a familiar broadcaster's challenge in the Canadian leisure and sports media market: generating genuine enthusiasm for a foreign tournament among an audience with competing entertainment options. The network's strategic directive, as reported by clapboard.com via Steve Persico's account in Strategy magazine, combined a love of the sport's physical object — the tennis ball — with the need to place TSN's brand inside the recreational spaces where tennis players and fans already spent their time.
The insight is rooted in environmental relevance. Conventional sports broadcast promotion in Canada typically occupies passive media channels — television pre-rolls, transit posters, digital display — where the audience is a bystander. By situating the campaign inside operational tennis courts, Leo Burnett Toronto converted the OOH surface into an active leisure touchpoint, making TSN visible at the precise moment a potential viewer was already engaged with the sport. This approach distinguished TSN's campaign from competitors in the Canadian sports broadcasting landscape, including Sportsnet, which also holds significant live sports rights in Canada and relies heavily on traditional broadcast promotion tactics.
Tennis sponsorship spending reached a record level in 2014, according to The Drum, reflecting the global appetite for association with the sport at that moment. The US Open alone generated approximately $89.5 million in sponsorship revenue in 2014, according to linkedin.com, signalling the commercial scale of the property TSN was promoting. Against that backdrop, Leo Burnett Toronto's decision to invest in physical installation rather than paid media buying represented a deliberate creative risk — one that aimed to earn attention rather than purchase it, and to generate press coverage and award recognition that would amplify the campaign's reach well beyond the courts where the murals stood.
Leo Burnett Toronto assembled a senior creative team to bring the campaign to life. According to Strategyonline Ca, the team included Chief Creative Officer Judy John, who also served as Creative Director alongside Lisa Greenberg, with Steve Persico as Copywriter and additional Art Direction credited to the broader Leo Burnett Toronto studio. Persico described the creative genesis plainly, as quoted in Strategy magazine on February 19, 2016 and cited by clapboard.com: "They wanted to promote coverage of the U.S. Open. We had a love of tennis balls."
The executional craft of Kings and Queens of the Court sits in the tradition of large-format environmental graphics, but its material specificity sets it apart from painted or printed murals. Each of the three installations used real tennis balls — 15,000 in total, as documented by both dandad.org and commarts.com — positioned individually within the structure of the mural to form recognisable portraits and scenes tied to the US Open's tournament narrative. The murals measured 30 by 12 feet, according to commarts.com, requiring precise engineering of the supporting structure to hold the balls in place through outdoor conditions while remaining accessible enough for members of the public to physically remove individual balls as keepsakes.
The take-away mechanic is a defining creative decision. Each branded tennis ball that left the court carried the TSN and US Open identity into a domestic or recreational setting, extending the campaign's physical footprint beyond the installation site. The D&AD 2015 archive entry, as documented by dandad.org, categorised the work under Wayfinding and Environmental Graphics, affirming the jury's reading of it as a spatial and experiential piece rather than a conventional advertising execution. That classification reflects the campaign's genuine ambition to reshape the tennis court itself into a media environment.
TSN reported a 24% year-over-year increase in viewership for its US Open coverage following the Kings and Queens of the Court campaign, according to clapboard.com and dandad.org. That figure is equivalent to more than two million additional viewers, as documented by clapboard.com, representing a material lift in audience scale for a single tournament property in the Canadian market.
The campaign's award record provides a second layer of verified impact. According to dandad.org, Kings and Queens of the Court received a D&AD Wood Pencil in 2015 in the Wayfinding and Environmental Graphics category. According to The One Club, the campaign also received a One Show Gold in the Direct category in 2015. Both juries are among the most selective in global advertising, and recognition in two distinct categories — environmental craft and direct response effectiveness — reflects the campaign's structural dual ambition: to create a visually compelling installation and to drive a measurable behavioural outcome.
No independent third-party audience measurement data beyond TSN's own reported figures is publicly available for this campaign. The viewership increase, while significant in scale, originates from the broadcaster rather than from an external ratings body, a standard limitation of network-reported metrics. Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness is consistent with the sampling mechanic: a physically distributed branded object, placed inside an active leisure environment, creates a chain of engagement from installation to take-away to home use that conventional OOH cannot replicate. Clapboard rates Kings and Queens of the Court at 63 out of 100, recognising its creative distinction and verified audience result against the constraints of a single-market, limited-distribution execution.
Kings and Queens of the Court is a 2014 Canadian OOH campaign by Leo Burnett Toronto for TSN. It used 15,000 real tennis balls to build three large murals at local tennis courts, promoting TSN's coverage of the US Open while allowing the public to take branded balls home.
TSN's campaign used 15,000 tennis balls across three murals, according to documentation by dandad.org and commarts.com. Each mural measured 30 by 12 feet and was installed at a local Canadian tennis court, with individual balls available for members of the public to remove and keep.
TSN reported a 24% year-over-year viewership increase for its US Open coverage, according to clapboard.com and dandad.org. That increase equated to more than two million additional viewers in Canada, making it a measurable outcome directly attributed to the campaign period by the broadcaster.
Kings and Queens of the Court received a D&AD Wood Pencil in Wayfinding and Environmental Graphics in 2015, according to dandad.org, and a One Show Gold in the Direct category in 2015, according to oneclub.org. Both are among advertising's most competitive international award programmes.
Leo Burnett Toronto created the campaign for TSN and Bell Media. The team included Chief Creative Officer Judy John, Creative Director Lisa Greenberg, and Copywriter Steve Persico, according to strategyonline.ca. Persico noted the concept took almost two years to reach execution, as reported by clapboard.com.
Leo Burnett Toronto chose outdoor media to place TSN's brand inside active tennis environments where the target audience already played, according to clapboard.com. Installing murals at Canadian courts created direct relevance between the campaign and the sport, distinguishing TSN's approach from conventional broadcast promotion tactics used by competitors.
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