Ryan Lopano Blog

The New York Rangers are a professional hockey team that competes in the National Hockey League (NHL). They have four Stanley Cup Championships, including their most recent one in 1994, and have been in the league for over 100 years. As a huge hockey fan and a New York native, the Rangers have been a very important part of my life. Because of this, I want to help elevate their social media presents.
The Rangers have a great opportunity to improve their branding and capitalize on the recent success of the Knicks. Sports pride is at an all-time high near Madison Square Garden, and around the entire city, and it would be very smart for the Rangers to take advantage of it. With New York being one of the biggest sports markets in the world, having high quality photography, videography, and graphics would be a great way to achieve this. While doing research for this campaign, I found some excellent work from the Carolina Hurricanes, showing some top notch graphic design and social media work. One of my favorite creatives from the Hurricanes, is Jack Ridenour, who has create some excellent graphics for the playoffs and other special events. Some of his work is shown bellow.

Now that we’ve seen some high quality work, now it is important to see the strategy behind the New York Rangers 2026-27 social media campaign. As seen in the Knicks playoff run, New York had ridiculously large following. Now that New York sports are at an all time high, I think it is very important to the Rangers to capitalize on these fans. Regardless of if they care about hockey, these fans care about New York. If you are able to show them what is so cool about hockey, such as the high quality goals and the physical fights, you could get them hooked onto both hockey and the Rangers. When creating this campaign, the goals were to increase the Rangers’ Instagram engagement rate by over 15% over a three-month time period and increase the percentage of New York City based followers by 10%. Both of these relate back to the message of the campaign and show how important it is to relate back to New Yorkers.