Christopher A. Ritter’s Chicago Cubs campaign lets fans fill the blank

The Brand Identity: When Christopher A. Ritter joined the team developing the Chicago Cubs’ ticket-sales campaign, the brief was a single slide. A photograph of the bleachers with three words underneath: ‘Get butts here.’ MLB campaigns tend to lean on the roster, which works when the team’s superstars are delivering, but makes the campaign vulnerable the moment on-field performance slips. As a result, Ritter and the team treated the brief as licence to look elsewhere. Elsewhere meant Wrigley Field.

The Chicago Cubs play on the city’s North Side at one of the most recognisable stadiums in North American sport, and the season campaign for ticket sales runs across the city, in-stadium media and digital channels. Ritter, an independent creative director who worked alongside three other creative directors on the project, was leading the visual system while they focused on copy.

The platform they landed on, [THIS] is Everything, points at the experience of being at Wrigley and invites fans to fill in the blank with their own version of it. “The Cubs already possess one of the strongest in-person emotional experiences in Major League Baseball,” Ritter tells us. The opportunity, as he frames it, sat in marketing the feeling of being at Wrigley Field. The argument is partly strategic – a campaign anchored to atmosphere holds up across winning and losing seasons – and partly a recognition of what fans already return for.

The ivy, day baseball, the seventh inning stretch, the neighbourhood around the stadium, the strangers in adjacent seats. [THIS] arrived as one of three candidate platforms. The first, You Belong Here, leaned heavily into collage, layering fans, players, ivy walls and stadium moments into a single tapestry. The second, Let’s Friggin’ Go, took its cue from Chicago vernacular and fan energy, paired with visuals Ritter describes as drawn from Chicago transit graphics and modernist design systems – Müller-Brockmann and Vignelli in spirit, set against more blue-collar, fan-driven copywriting.

But it was [THIS] that became the campaign concept. Its appeal sat in how naturally it accommodated the breadth of the Wrigley Park experience. Almost any photograph taken at the stadium feels distinctly Cubs the moment a viewer sees it, and the bracketed device lets the campaign point at any of those moments. “It also created an almost infinite headline system,” Ritter explains.

“[THIS] could flex across emotional moments, gameplay, fan culture, traditions, details inside the stadium or even quiet moments.” Pre-season promotions stretched the system to little kids asleep in the bleachers as part of the memory of going to Wrigley. The handcrafted paint gestures running through the campaign came out of inexpensive acrylic from local craft shops. Nothing precious or specialist – the Cubs palette is already recognisable enough that Ritter could begin experimenting in blues, reds, whites and a few neutrals straight away.

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The campaign's focus on emotional connection and fan personalization is significant for brand strategy in sports, offering insights into effective engagement, though similar concepts have been explored in other contexts.