ZSC Lions Melt Pandemic Distance With Collectible Ice Campaign
ZSC Lions' Essence of Lions campaign mailed 4,000 season-ticket holders a 15ml bottle of melted Hallenstadion rink ice as a collectible memento — a tangible piece of the 2020/21 season they were banned from attending in person — created by Serviceplan Switzerland and published in Switzerland in April 2021 to drive season-ticket renewal during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Swiss government banned spectators from sports events in March 2020, according to reporting by Persönlich, leaving more than 4,000 ZSC Lions season-ticket holders paying for games they could not attend. For a professional ice hockey club in the National League, that situation carried serious financial risk. Season-ticket revenue forms a structural pillar of club funding across Swiss sport, and the ZSC Lions needed those holders to renew for the following season without having experienced a single live match during the one just completed.
Serviceplan Switzerland's answer was to collapse the physical distance between fan and rink. Ice from the very surface on which the Lions played their 2020/21 home season was melted and poured into small 15ml glass bottles, each one branded and mailed directly to season-ticket holders across Switzerland. The gesture was framed not as a compensation but as a celebration — a bottled artefact of shared devotion that the club called, with deliberate grandeur, fifteen millilitres of ZSC history. A campaign film and a dedicated page on the ZSC Lions website accompanied the physical gift, guiding recipients through a series of fantastical proposed uses: baptising newborn ZSC Lions supporters, reviving wilting houseplants, cleansing rooms of malevolent spirits, and polishing championship trophies. The tone was warm and lightly comic, but the underlying message was earnest: the club had not forgotten its fans, and it expected its fans would not forget the club.
Season-ticket revenue anchors ZSC Lions' operating model. Swiss National League clubs averaged annual budgets of approximately CHF 21 million between 2014 and 2019, according to research published by ZHAW, with sponsorship averaging approximately CHF 6.8 million per club annually over the same period. With gate receipts eliminated by government order in Switzerland, any shortfall in renewal rates threatened a significant portion of cash flow that could not be replaced by other revenue streams in the short term.
The strategic challenge Serviceplan Switzerland identified was not simply financial. Fans who had paid for a season they could not attend had a rational reason to pause or cancel — not out of disloyalty but out of a straightforward sense that value had not been delivered. The Essence of Lions campaign addressed that calculus directly by transforming the unfulfilled promise of a live season into a different kind of value: an irreproducible physical object that no future ticketholder could acquire. The collectible water bottle was simultaneously a thank-you, a loyalty marker, and a reason to stay.
In Switzerland, the competitive landscape for fan attention includes SC Bern, which according to ZHAW operated a 17,131-seat arena with approximately 95% occupancy and average regular-season attendance of 16,290 in 2019, making it the dominant crowd-draw in the National League. Genève-Servette HC represents a second major rival for Swiss ice hockey mindshare. Against peers of that scale, ZSC Lions could not compete on spectacle during a closed-arena season. Competing instead on intimacy — a personally addressed bottle of the actual ice — was a defensible strategic move that required no venue and minimal media spend. According to a 2021 sponsorship survey cited by ZHAW, companies allocated an average of 25% of marketing budgets to sports sponsorship, signalling that brand association with emotionally resonant sports moments remained commercially valued even during pandemic disruption.
Raul Serrat served as Chief Creative Officer at Serviceplan Switzerland on the Essence of Lions campaign. Serrat described the project's ambition in adobo Magazine in May 2021: "With a few icy drops, this project warmed the hearts of fans in difficult times. As a creative, this is what I take the most pride in: creating work that inspires and reminds people of what really matters to them." That statement positions the campaign not as a transactional renewal mechanic but as an act of craft driven by emotional sincerity.
The creative team at Serviceplan Switzerland built the campaign around a single, arresting idea: the rink itself is the sacred object, and the fans deserve a piece of it. Ice harvested from the Hallenstadion surface — the physical ground on which the ZSC Lions' 2020/21 season had been contested — was melted, bottled in 15ml glass vials, branded, and mailed. The medium was the message. No digital rendering or printed facsimile could have achieved the same effect; the campaign's emotional authority came entirely from the authenticity of its raw material.
The creative team also drafted a companion campaign film that leaned into absurdist humour to articulate the bottle's supposed properties. The list of suggested uses — infant baptism, plant revival, spiritual cleansing, trophy maintenance — operated on two levels simultaneously. On the surface, they were comic exaggerations. Underneath, each one encoded a genuine fan behaviour: bringing a child into the ZSC Lions fold, persisting through adversity, purifying a space, celebrating victory. The humour made the sentiment portable and shareable without undermining it. According to LBBOnline, which covered the campaign in April 2021, the execution was presented as an emotionally resonant response to what the publication described as the "silent season." Chief Creative Officers Raul Serrat and Pam Hügli, Executive Creative Directors Marcin Baba and Micha Seger collectively led the creative direction, producing a campaign classified as a direct medium execution containing a single primary media asset.
No independently verified renewal-rate percentage or quantified revenue lift for the Essence of Lions campaign is publicly available. However, according to a Swiss Effie case documented at Effie Ch, the campaign avoided an anticipated shortfall in season-ticket revenue — a material outcome for a club whose financial model depended on those holders committing to a season they had been unable to experience in person. That qualitative confirmation from the industry's primary effectiveness body carries meaningful weight even in the absence of precise figures.
The campaign earned a finalist placement at the New York Festivals Advertising Awards in the Sports: Team or League Promotion category, entered by Serviceplan Suisse AG and ZSC Lions AG, according to nyfadvertising.com. No verified recognition was found at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards international competition, the One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. The New York Festivals finalist status nonetheless confirms that the campaign was assessed by an independent international jury as a credible creative achievement within its category.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on a mechanism that is difficult to ignore. More than 4,000 individually addressed physical objects were mailed to named season-ticket holders, according to Persönlich's reporting in April 2021. Each one created a private, tactile moment between the club and a paying supporter at the precise moment that supporter was deciding whether to recommit. A digital campaign cannot replicate that moment of physical arrival. The Clapboard Score for Essence of Lions is 64 out of 100, reflecting a campaign whose core idea is genuinely distinctive and emotionally coherent but whose documented output — a single media asset and a direct mail mechanism — limits the measurable breadth of its creative and commercial ambition.
Essence of Lions is a 2021 direct marketing campaign by Serviceplan Switzerland for ZSC Lions. It mailed 15ml bottles of melted Hallenstadion rink ice to more than 4,000 season-ticket holders in Switzerland as a collectible memento designed to encourage renewal during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Swiss fans were banned from attending matches.
The Swiss government banned spectators from sports events in March 2020. ZSC Lions faced the risk of season-ticket holders declining to renew for a season they had not attended. The Essence of Lions gift acknowledged fan loyalty and gave holders a reason to recommit, helping the club avoid an anticipated shortfall in season-ticket revenue, according to effie.ch.
Serviceplan Switzerland, also listed as Serviceplan Suisse AG, created Essence of Lions for ZSC Lions. The campaign was led by Chief Creative Officers Raul Serrat and Pam Hügli, with Executive Creative Directors Marcin Baba and Micha Seger. The campaign was published in Switzerland in April 2021 and classified as a direct medium execution.
Essence of Lions was a finalist at the New York Festivals Advertising Awards in the Sports: Team or League Promotion category, according to nyfadvertising.com. No verified recognition was found at Cannes Lions, D&AD, the One Show, Clio Awards, Webby Awards, Effie Awards international competition, or WARC Awards at the time of this analysis.
No independently verified renewal-rate figures are publicly available. According to effie.ch, the campaign helped ZSC Lions avoid an anticipated shortfall in season-ticket revenue. The campaign reached more than 4,000 season-ticket holders through individually mailed collectible water bottles, according to Persönlich's reporting. Clapboard rates the campaign 64 out of 100.
Each bottle contained 15ml of water produced by melting ice harvested directly from the Hallenstadion rink surface where ZSC Lions played their 2020/21 home season in Switzerland. The bottles were branded and mailed to season-ticket holders, accompanied by a campaign film suggesting uses including baptising fans' children, reviving plants, and polishing trophies, as reported by LBBOnline.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
