The challenge was to rekindle fan's lost love affair with sports. To remind the larger community that sports are bigger than bats, balls, courts, fields, stats, scores, plays, silly mascots, coaches, teams or players. Sports are the most passionate, dramatic, unpredictable form of inspirational entertainment, we as humans soak up-they inspire songs, movies, novels, arguments, friendships, enemies, how we talk, dress, think, interact, they galvanize communities and countries-touching every single human emotion and connecting us all in the name of something greater. Our mantra, in short, is that "sports are bigger than sports".This effort was meant to not only bring new energy to the brand, but also to drive an increased demand for sports, and ESPN. We wanted to whet the appetites of casual and lapsed fans for more sports and to remind them what a world would be like "Without Sports..."

We created the "Without Sports" campaign which imagined the consequences (negative, of course) of a world with no sports. We reached out to a wide variety of audiences-everyone from basketball, football and baseball fans to more "general" fans- through multiple TV, print out of home and non-traditional executions. Collectively, the work helped ESPN establish a running dialogue with fans- in their living room, on their way to work, in the magazines they read, at the breakfast table, even on their doorstep. The culmination of which reminded fans that there are so many aspects of sports and life that we just can't live without.