ANTONY
SHEPHERD
The Challenge
Every golf sponsorship promises reach. Almost none can prove it. The Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, a flagship Rolex Series event, wanted its four days at Yas Links to do both, entertain 40,000 people across families, purists, and casual fans, and for the first time in the tournament's history, come back with hard evidence of who they were and how they behaved. The brief wasn't a better fan zone. It was proof.
The Plan
The insight: you can't measure what people rush past. So we designed for dwell, not footfall. As Creative Director, working with Inicio as lead agency, I led the creative vision and execution end to end, spatial layout, activation design, live programming, on-site delivery, all engineered around one principle: every zone had to earn attention long enough to learn something from it.
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Future Falcons Kids Zone, built to hold families, the segment that stays longest and spends most
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HSBC and DP World Tour activation zones, where entertainment and GDPR-compliant data capture were designed as one experience, not a form bolted onto a game
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F&B and hospitality, positioned to control flow and extend dwell where the insight mattered most
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Respecting brand guidelines throughout, we turned a four-day event into the tournament's first live audience-insight platform.
The Execution
Delivering this meant one creative logic holding from concept to kerb. I ran a single pipeline across client, agency, and on-ground teams, so the idea that started as a data-capture strategy survived intact through fabrication, install, and four live days, no drift, no dilution. The result was an experience that entertained at festival scale while quietly doing something no prior edition had managed: turning 40,000 visitors into the DP World Tour's first data-backed audience picture.
Case Studies
Brand, campaign, and experiential work for some of the region's most demanding names.
UNMISSABLE
The Success
40,000+
Attendees
Over 40,000 attendees explored the fan village, transforming Yas Links into a four-day festival of sport, music, and culture.
3x Dwell
Audience engagement vs prior years
Engagement tripled through well-placed activations, interactive digital experiences, and data-driven design that encouraged repeat participation.
1st
Data-Backed Audience, GDPR
The first edition in the tournament's history to capture who its audience actually was, dwell time, demographics, behaviour, all fully GDPR-compliant.
10,000+ sqm
Multi-zone experiential layout
Spanning over 10,000 square meters, the fan village balanced entertainment, hospitality, and brand activations to create seamless visitor flow and longer dwell times.
Brand, campaign, and experiential work for some of the region's most demanding names.
Case Studies