Ice Hockey World Championship 2024: Digital Marketing Behind Record-Breaking Attendance

797,727 fans who helped set a new all-time attendance record. A record (previously held by Czechia from 2015) broken by over 55,000 people. You know our hockey players brought home the gold. But did you know that we at Digital Ants helped sell the tickets online?

Selling hockey to Czechs? Harder than it sounds.

The Czech Republic is hosting the Ice Hockey World Championship for the first time in 9 years. On paper, a dream. In reality, an attendance challenge nobody expected.

The public had little faith in the Czech team. Russian and Belarusian fans — traditionally among the most numerous at any championship — were absent due to the war in Ukraine. And interest in tickets for games without the Czech national team was colder than a freshly resurfaced rink.

Our Collaboration: Starting a Year and a Half Before the First Puck Drop

We launched the campaigns in April 2023 — more than a year before the championship began. The entire promotional effort was split into six phases, each with clearly defined goals, both optimistic and pessimistic media plan scenarios, and measurable outputs. This meant we could report to the client at any moment: where we stood, what was working, and what wasn't.

We worked simultaneously on two fronts.

PPC was the performance engine of the entire campaign. On Meta, we covered the full sales funnel — from building awareness and growing the fanbase, through remarketing, all the way to direct ticket sales. On Google, we combined YouTube campaigns, search advertising, and Demand Gen. The sheer volume of campaign types, countries, and sales phases running simultaneously was extraordinary — and each required its own optimization.

Social media ran hand in hand with PPC. We filmed videos with coach Rulík and future broadcasting star Jakub Voráček, planned weekly content calendars with the Czech Ice Hockey Association, and steadily built a fanbase that fuelled the performance of paid campaigns. The overarching marketing strategy was led by our friends at Unicorn Attacks, while the visual identity came from studio superlative.works — our team handled all performance and social marketing.

How We Sold What Doesn't Sell Itself

In the early stages, tickets were sold exclusively in day packages — a ticket to an attractive game was bundled with one for a lesser-known team. But even quarter-finals, semi-finals, and group games without the Czech national team saw little genuine interest at first. And without selling those tickets, breaking the record was nothing but a dream.

Our Approach: How Did We Get Fans to Look Beyond Czech Games?

Thematic Campaigns and Smart Segmentation

We started with thematic campaigns. At Christmas, we targeted parents of hockey-playing kids with tickets as a gift under the tree — and partners who could treat their other halves to a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The best results came from campaigns using Advantage+ targeting, where the algorithm independently found users with the highest conversion probability, going beyond manually set audience attributes.

Around Valentine's Day, targeting women with VIP final tickets proved particularly effective. This messaging achieved double the engagement rate compared to other ads — even though working with a smaller audience meant higher CPM.

International Markets

In parallel, we opened the international front. We launched campaigns in Poland, Finland, Germany, Lithuania, Switzerland, Latvia, Austria, and Slovakia. In each country, we went after hardcore hockey fans and tailored the message to local context — we reminded Latvians of their historically first bronze medal from the previous year, enticed Poles with their return to the world elite after 22 years, and told Germans this was their chance to turn last year's silver into gold.

One key finding was localisation into the native language. Translating campaigns from English into Polish tripled the engagement rate. Videos tailored to a specific country — ideally with a local voiceover — consistently outperformed generic formats.

On the Ground

During the championship itself, we updated creatives every day based on real-time ticket sales data, and targeted tourists physically present in Prague. The message was simple: it doesn't matter whether you get a ticket to a Czech national team game — you're in for an unforgettable experience either way.

Results

IIHF 2024 became the most-attended ice hockey championship in history. 797,727 fans in Prague and Ostrava — breaking the 2015 record by more than 55,000 people.

“The Digital Ants team handled the whole thing for two years with brilliance and complete composure. How to split the budget, maximise sales across multiple countries, through several sales phases and all digital channels at once — that's a lot of ingredients in one pot. And that's exactly how the game should be played.”

What does PPC specialist Vojta have to say?

Vojta

PPC Specialist, Digital Ants

“The main goal was clear — beat the attendance of the previous championship and make IIHF 2024 the most-attended in history. You might think it's enough to focus on driving sales a few weeks before the tournament. But it wasn't that simple.

The final sales push was preceded by six phases, each with clearly defined expectations. For me, that meant always having both an optimistic and a pessimistic version of the media plan ready, showing projected results and illustrating the measurable impact of each activity.

I was managing the full breadth of available campaign types simultaneously, across multiple countries at the same time. Add to that the huge domestic appetite for a trophy — and you get a campaign where you could really feel how much the outcome mattered.”