Innovation Arena

You might think, “What does an ETF have to do with basketball?” And the answer: nothing.

Look, Invesco QQQ is a great ETF. Great returns, great diverse bucket of tech-focused stocks. But during what amounts to the greatest three weeks in American sports, it’s impossible to get people seriously excited about an index fund while there are nail-biters and buzzer beaters happening. So we decided to stop talking about the product and build something that could let people experience a buzzer beater for themselves.

When you stepped into the half-court of the Innovation Arena, fifteen-foot LED walls on three sides surrounded you. Candace Parker appeared, Star Wars-hologram style, and welcomed you, contextualizing the March Madness moments you’d be recreating. There’s a beat. And then the arena lights power on to reveal twenty thousand AI fans, reacting to your every move.

Guests could choose from three games, each built around an iconic March Madness moment: Kris Jenkins in 2016 and Arike Ogunbowale in 2018 for the buzzer beater, Kyle Guy in 2019 and Monique Reid in 2013 for the high stakes free throws, and Candace Parker in 2007 for thirty seconds of pure hot hands. As you played, the crowd cheered (or jeered). And even held up enormous printouts of your face.

Writing an Announcer who knows everyone by name.

It’s not a March Madness game without an announcer. We needed a voice that could call the in-experience action, every single time, live. But how do you write a script for an AI announcer commenting on different players with different names all playing different games?

You don’t. You develop a system. I worked it out alone first, then brought in the team and our production partner. From there, we brought in a real voice actor, used his voice performance to train the AI engine, and integrated with the vision data coming in from in-Arena cameras to give everybody a personalized play-by-play, including your name, how you were doing, and even some nicknames based on how you performed.

The job of a copywriter never ended at the last line of a script. We had to make sure the storytelling and messaging survives production, editing, and finishing. And now our job also includes building the rules that generate the lines that help personalize the brand storytelling. And, frankly, that’s an exciting job to have these days.

When fans stepped inside, all the eyes in the Innovation Arena were on them.

A single camera behind the backboard tracked both the player and the ball using computer vision. That vision empowered the CGI fans, who would turn their heads to react to your actions in real time, responding to every bucket and every brick with help from custom sensors in the rim. We also deployed a second, multi-camera system that tracked the action and automatically cut a personalized highlight video for players, available as soon as they left the Arena.

The physical build was fabricated by Scenic Route from our concepts, with AV by National Experiential. It ran at the Men’s Final Four Tip-Off Tailgate in Phoenix and the Women’s Final Four Tourney Town in Cleveland in 2024, and in San Antonio in 2025.

An Arena you can take with you?

For the 2025 build, our client wondered if we could make a smaller version that they could take to B2B conferences. So we developed a version called “Beat the Best.” Instead of a walk-in Arena, this wall-mounted vertical screen tracked your movement to simulate shots as you tried to see how your performance matched up against Candace Parker’s actual college shooting percentages. Candace herself appeared to challenge you.

When an idea isn’t propped up by all-surrounding, towering LED walls, you find out pretty quickly if there’s a there there. And being able to transmute the Innovation Arena to this smaller build proved out the power of the idea: that Invesco QQQ gives you access to the fruits of technology, whether in the form of returns or in fun experiences.