See MLB's Opening Day campaign from Wieden+Kennedy celebrating game's quirky charm

Major League Baseball refined its brand voice over the offseason.

A new campaign launching this week is meant to connect as much to MLB's casual fans as to its avid ones by celebrating the game’s quirky charms and its on-field thrills. The work from Wieden+Kennedy is intended to build the game’s brand over time, said Karin Timpone, MLB’s chief marketing officer.

Cameron J.’s a cappella rendering of the “William Tell Overture” is the soundtrack for a montage of getting-ready-for-baseball moments—ticket takers, sizzling hot dogs, grounds crews, batting practice and various pregame hoopla—that kicks off the new campaign, with the tagline “Baseball is something else.” The ad is timed for baseball’s Opening Day Thursday.

“There’s nothing in the world quite like baseball. It’s a game that we think can absolutely speak for itself,” Josh Bogdan, creative director at Wieden+Kennedy, said in an interview. “It runs the spectrum of tones: it is charming. It can also pull on the heartstrings. And it can also show elite athleticism. So it runs the spectrum. And because that’s true about that game, that can also be true about all of our work.

“What holds it all together, is authenticity,” Bogdan continued. “We don’t need to make anything up to show the greatness of this game. We’re really just holding up a mirror to everything that it is …We don’t need to script to scenarios that aren’t true in order to show the charm of this game, because there's so much embedded within it already.”

Timpone said MLB hired Wieden+Kennedy was hired late last season when baseball was ready to embark on a brand campaign she said would be broader in scope than MLB's seasonal campaigns of the past. Wieden was appointed the work on the basis of having provided good insights in talks earlier in the year, she said.

MLB and Wieden+Kennedy worked together in research to define the MLB brand, examining baseball’s audience and the game’s emotional and functional benefits “while thinking about how to wrap those together with the attributes you are trying to convey.”

The work arrived at attributes of “charming,” “communal,” “dynamic” and “purposeful,” and with a plan to express those attributes through stories illustrating the “tension between the expected and unexpected” that marks baseball, Timpone said. “Like there’s nothing happening—and then everything’s happening.”

Timpone said the campaign includes TV ads but also out-of-home and experiential activations at MLB events. “When you see the tagline of ‘Baseball is something else,’ we’re going to tell a story about all the various elements that make that up. That’s going to take many seasons to fully tell,” she said.

“We believe that by making an investment in our brand, it will make it more clear how to be more welcoming to fans wherever they are in their journey, whether or not they're already expert, or they're newer,” she added.

Unlike a year ago when a labor dispute put Opening Day on hold, MLB is charging into the new year on the momentum of the World Baseball Classic and the prospect of new rules designed to make gameplay faster and more exciting.

“All these things are coming together in a way that makes us feel really, really good about what we have on tap for 2023 in a way we haven’t felt for the last couple of years,” said Chris Marinak, chief operations and strategy officer for MLB, speaking at a press event at MLB’s Manhattan headquarters.