How USTA and DDB Turned Real Tennis Beginners Into a 2015 Digital Campaign
Luis, Dale, Katrina is a digital advertising campaign created by DDB New York for the United States Tennis Association, published in September 2015, comprising three media assets that profile real or representative individuals discovering the game of tennis for the first time.
The campaign arrives at a moment when the USTA is actively working to broaden the sport's appeal beyond its traditional demographic base in the United States. Rather than leading with professional stars or tournament prestige, Luis, Dale, Katrina centres on ordinary people — their names functioning as both a title and an implicit argument that tennis belongs to anyone. The choice of a community manager and strategist, Elliot Grossman, as a credited team member signals that the campaign is designed as much for social and conversational distribution as for passive viewing.
Published in September 2015, the campaign lands in the immediate cultural wake of the US Open, the annual Grand Slam tournament held in New York that reliably elevates public awareness of tennis across the United States. That timing is deliberate. The USTA owns and operates the US Open, making late summer and early autumn its most commercially and culturally potent window. By deploying a digital campaign about participation during the sport's highest-visibility moment, the USTA attempts to convert spectator interest into grassroots engagement.
The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 56 out of 100, reflecting a competent execution with a clear strategic rationale that stops short of landmark creative distinction. Three media assets constitute a compact but purposeful body of work, and the professional services framing — tennis as an activity available to working adults across the United States — runs consistently through the campaign's identity and tone.
The United States Tennis Association operates in a sports landscape where participation marketing carries as much weight as spectator marketing. The USTA's strategic challenge in 2015 is not awareness of tennis as a sport — the US Open ensures that — but conversion of that awareness into actual play. Luis, Dale, Katrina addresses that gap by making the on-court experience feel accessible rather than aspirational.
The broader market context supports the urgency of this approach. Tennis sponsorship spending reached approximately 739 million dollars globally in 2014, according to reporting cited by Mediapost, indicating a commercially healthy sport. Yet commercial health at the elite level does not automatically translate to participation growth at the community level. The USTA's investment in a campaign about named, relatable individuals rather than marquee professionals reflects an understanding that the path to sustainable sport growth runs through recreational players, not television audiences alone.
In the United States, the USTA faces indirect competitive pressure from sports and fitness categories competing for the same adult leisure time. Platforms such as Nike and the broader fitness-technology sector, including competitors like Planet Fitness that were aggressively marketing accessible exercise to non-traditional gym users during this period, represent the ambient competitive environment into which USTA must position tennis as a practical, enjoyable choice. DDB New York's decision to name the campaign after three individuals — Luis, Dale, and Katrina — rather than after a slogan or product feature directly counters the anonymising abstraction of mass fitness marketing. The USTA's own digital infrastructure, including USTA.com/Found, provides a destination that can convert narrative interest into a tangible next step for prospective players across the United States.
According to Kantar Media, the USTA spent approximately 4.9 million dollars on advertising during calendar year 2015, covering broader organisational activity. That figure contextualises Luis, Dale, Katrina as one component of a larger annual communications effort rather than a standalone flagship spend.
Pablo Delcan directs and animates the campaign, with production handled by Delcan & Company Studio. Delcan's creative identity — rooted in graphic precision and a distinctive illustrative sensibility — shapes the visual language of Luis, Dale, Katrina in ways that distinguish it from conventional sports advertising. Where most tennis campaigns in the United States default to kinetic footage of athletic excellence, Delcan's approach introduces a more considered, almost editorial aesthetic that slows the viewer down and invites identification with the subject rather than admiration of performance.
Visual effects are provided by Click 3X and sound by Heard City, according to Clapboard's production records. The involvement of a dedicated sound studio signals that the emotional register of the campaign is not treated as incidental — sound design and music are active creative instruments, shaping the intimacy that the campaign's human-centred premise requires. For a digital campaign comprising three assets, this level of production infrastructure suggests ambition proportionate to the USTA's US Open-adjacent release window.
Creative direction comes from John McGill and Luke Carmody, working under chief creative officer Icaro Doria at DDB New York. Doria's reputation for campaigns that carry genuine emotional intelligence — he is known internationally for work that finds universal human truths in specific, granular detail — is a plausible influence on the decision to anchor the entire campaign in three proper names. That nominative specificity is a creative idea in itself: Luis, Dale, and Katrina are not archetypes or target segments. They are people, and the campaign's title insists on treating them as such. Community manager and strategist Elliot Grossman's credited role further suggests that the creative and distribution strategy are conceived together rather than sequentially, a sophistication that reflects DDB New York's integrated approach to digital work during this period.
No verified performance data for Luis, Dale, Katrina is publicly available. No campaign-specific metrics for sales lift, website registrations, brand tracking movement, or social engagement have been located in Adweek, Mediapost, iSpot.tv, or WARC databases. The absence of published results is not unusual for a mid-scale digital campaign from 2015, a period when many organisations had not yet standardised public reporting of digital campaign outcomes.
Structural analysis offers a credible proxy for effectiveness. The campaign's three-asset format is well suited to sequential digital distribution — each named individual representing a discrete story capable of standing alone or accumulating meaning across the set. The USTA.com/Found destination, embedded in the campaign's architecture, creates a measurable conversion pathway even in the absence of published conversion data. The September 2015 publication date, timed to the US Open's cultural momentum, maximises organic reach during the single period when tennis holds the broadest share of American public attention.
No awards for Luis, Dale, Katrina have been verified in the Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby, or WARC databases. That absence, combined with the Clapboard Score of 56 out of 100, positions the campaign as a strategically sound and creatively considered piece of work that does not reach the threshold of industry-defining impact. Its value is more likely found in the cumulative effect of consistent USTA brand-building across the United States than in any single measurable outcome attributable to this campaign alone.
Luis, Dale, Katrina is a digital advertising campaign created by DDB New York for the United States Tennis Association in September 2015. The campaign profiles real or representative individuals discovering tennis and comprises three media assets designed to encourage participation in the sport across the United States.
Pablo Delcan directed and animated the campaign, with production handled by Delcan and Company Studio. Visual effects were provided by Click 3X and sound by Heard City. Creative direction came from John McGill and Luke Carmody under chief creative officer Icaro Doria at DDB New York.
Naming the campaign Luis, Dale, Katrina positions tennis as a sport for ordinary Americans rather than elite athletes. The strategy counters mass fitness marketing by making the sport feel personal and specific, reinforcing the USTA's broader 2015 goal of converting US Open spectator interest into grassroots participation across the United States.
Luis, Dale, Katrina receives a Clapboard Score of 56 out of 100. This score reflects a strategically coherent and creatively considered campaign that does not reach landmark distinction. The rating accounts for the campaign's clear human-centred rationale and its targeted September 2015 release alongside the US Open.
No awards for Luis, Dale, Katrina have been verified across Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby, or WARC databases. The campaign is documented as a digital professional services campaign published in the United States in September 2015, but no industry recognition has been publicly confirmed for this specific work.
DDB New York also created the preceding Tennis Makes You campaign for USTA in 2014, targeting millennials through five short online films. Luis, Dale, Katrina follows that participatory strategy, shifting focus toward named individuals to deepen the human dimension of USTA's digital outreach across the United States in 2015.
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