How Boston went batty for the Scots – the Red Sox have already won the World Cup

The Scotland men’s national football team are at their first World Cup in 28 years. To cheer the team on and celebrate their qualification, more than 30,000 party ready Scots have descended on Boston, watching John McGinn help secure a 1-0 win over Haiti with his goal in the country’s opening match of the tournament.  

While that victory may have been Scotland’s first in the tournament since 1990, another resounding success has unfolded elsewhere in the city. Ahead of the tournament, Travis Pollio, the Red Sox director of ticket strategy and promotions, noticed that Scotland’s opening match fell the day before a home game at Fenway Park, the baseball side’s historic stadium. He could have ignored it; instead, ‘Scotland Day’ was born.

Following Scotland’s win – with spirits still high – the Tartan Army marched from the city’s Evans Way Park to Fenway, led by a band of pipers. Fans were gifted special edition blue tartan Red Sox jerseys, and the mascots ‘Tessie and Wally’ appeared in traditional Scottish dress. During the match itself, a crowd that had, mostly, never watched a baseball game in their lives, created a huge atmosphere by belting their way through the classic tunes with ‘Flower of Scotland’, ‘I’m Gonna Be’ and ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ echoing through the stands.

Of the 32,000 people inside Fenway that night, BBC Sport’s reporter on the ground, Scott Mullen, estimated you could treble Pollio’s initial forecast of 4,000 Scottish fans and not be overstating it. The Red Sox lost 6-4 to the Texas Rangers, although almost nobody seemed to mind.

What made this work wasn’t a slick campaign concept with all the bells and whistles. Pollio spotted a simple opportunity: thousands of Scotland supporters were already in his city and looking for something to do between football matches, with Scotland set to play Morocco this coming Friday. Before the gates even opened, pipe bands were playing outside on Jersey Street, fans in kilts were spilling across the concourses and the kind of atmosphere that you can’t artificially manufacture was already building in the stands.

Scots who had never watched a baseball game in their lives were singing their hearts out by the end of the first inning. The audience overlap was almost perfect – Bostonians are renowned for their sporting spirit – and, because the activation was built around people who were already there, the cost relative to what it returned was negligible.

The magic of this activation lies in its raw, unfiltered delivery. The Red Sox created the occasion and then allowed the fans to create the atmosphere. Every one of those supporters likely had a phone in their pocket. Every photo posted, every story shared, every TikTok uploaded put the Red Sox brand in front of audiences the club would never have reached through paid media. The best user generated content usually isn’t manufactured through hashtag competitions or giveaways – it happens organically when you give people something genuinely worth sharing.

In another world, this is an activation where someone has added three approval layers, a brand safety review and a six-week lead time that would cause it to become a sanitised co-branding exercise that ultimately generates nothing. The version that happened was confident and trusting enough to let the crowd take it somewhere.

A lesson that every comms and marketing team should take from this event is, instead of asking ‘how can we attach ourselves to this event?’, rather, ‘how do we create a moment and a memory for fans?’

According to CreativeX, an analytics platform for marketers, the ultimate driver of buying decision is memory. Now, whenever one of those Scotland fans think of baseball, they will instantly think of the Red Sox and that incredible night they experienced at Fenway, ultimately making them more likely to visit again or purchase merchandise. You must also consider the millions of views that the atmosphere has generated on social media by people stunned that a regular season Major League Baseball match has been commandeered by rowdy Scots.

During a World Cup, every host city has a full schedule. Every match creates a temporary captive audience of supporters, journalists and curious locals who don’t vanish at the final whistle. The teams and brands earning attention right now aren’t always the official partners, it is the brands sensing an opportunity, spotted something the others missed and moved before the window closed.