JUSTIN LUND
Creative Director & Brand Storyteller
KOAT7 Sports Brand Relaunch | KOAT7 (2021)
Beyond every win, or heartbreak, is a story that makes that moment matter.
Overview
COMPANY: KOAT7, Hearst Television
ROLE: Assistant Creative Director
PROJECT TYPE: Sports Brand Relaunch, Broadcast Promotion, Multi-Platform Campaign
PRIMARY GOAL: Relaunch KOAT 7 Sports as the market's premiere storytelling-driven sports brand
KEY WORK: Campaign Strategy, Archive Research, Video Production, Scripting, Editing, Motion Design
The Challenge
When KOAT relaunched its sports department in 2020, the goal was bigger than simply bringing back nightly scores and highlights.
The station wanted to build a sports brand with a stronger emotional center. New Mexico does not have a major professional sports franchise, but it does have passionate communities, historic moments, devoted fan bases, local athletes, racing culture, college sports, high school rivalries, and deeply personal stories connected to competition.
The challenge was to make KOAT 7 Sports feel essential in a market where sports coverage had to be about more than final scores. The campaign needed to show viewers that KOAT would not just tell them who won or lost. It would explain why those moments mattered.
TALENT BRANDING SPOTS
The Strategy
The strategy was to relaunch KOAT 7 Sports around storytelling, emotion, and local identity.
Instead of positioning the department as a standard highlight desk, the campaign framed KOAT Sports as a place where viewers could go deeper into New Mexico athletics. Wins, losses, rivalries, comebacks, heartbreaks, and community pride all became part of the brand promise.
The creative direction was built around the idea of taking viewers behind the sports moments they already cared about. That meant using archival footage, emotional writing, talent-driven storytelling, and bold visual identifiers to create a full campaign system across broadcast, web, and social.
The campaign had to do three things at once: announce the return of KOAT 7 Sports, define what made the department different, and introduce the new sports team as credible storytellers viewers could trust.
CHANNEL ID STRINGOUT
My Contribution
I helped lead the strategy and creative development behind the relaunch campaign.
I started by digging through decades of archived footage and regional sports history, looking for moments that showed the full range of New Mexico’s sports culture. From teams and athletes to car racing, local traditions, big wins, painful losses, and community moments, I used that material to build a campaign that felt specific to the state.
The first major piece was an overall brand launch promo for KOAT 7 Sports. I wrote and edited the main campaign spot, along with cutdowns that carried the core message across different runtimes and platforms. The campaign made it clear that KOAT Sports would cover more than scores and highlights. It would tell the stories behind the moments.
From there, I created a series of short brand IDs, including four-second, five-second, and ten-second identifiers. These pieces used sports footage from across New Mexico, freezing key moments in time and animating the stills to visually pull viewers into the emotion behind each play, race, win, or loss.
I also created interview-style talent spots to introduce the newly relaunched sports team. KOAT had brought in Ron Burke as Sports Director and Bethany Miller as a multimedia journalist. I filmed them inside major New Mexico sports venues, using those settings to help them explain their careers, their connection to sports storytelling, and what they wanted to bring viewers every day.
Together, the campaign created a full promotional ecosystem for KOAT 7 Sports across image spots, short IDs, talent pieces, broadcast promotion, web, and social.
What I Gained
This project strengthened my understanding of how to relaunch a content brand with both clarity and emotion.
KOAT 7 Sports needed more than a logo package or a few hype edits. It needed a point of view. The campaign taught me how to take a department-level relaunch and turn it into a larger brand promise that viewers could understand quickly.
It also sharpened my ability to build meaning from archival material. By digging through old footage and regional sports history, I learned how to find emotional patterns inside raw assets and use them to shape a modern campaign.
Most importantly, this project reinforced that sports marketing works best when it reaches beyond the scoreboard. The win matters. The loss matters. But the reason people care is usually found in the people, places, and communities wrapped around the moment.
