Wieden+Kennedy London has created a new brand platform and campaign for the ATP Tour, the year-round men’s tennis circuit that counts heavily towards player world rankings. This has informed the name of the platform, It All Adds Up, signalling how these smaller year-round tournaments influence the standings.

If you liken the sport to football, even casual viewers are familiar with the Premier League and the Championship. However, in tennis, while many people follow the majors – Wimbledon, the French Open, the US Open and the Australian Open – the ATP Tour is less of a household name among the general public.

Andrew Walker, senior VP of brand and marketing at ATP Tour, has hopes to “move the ATP Tour and our athletes deeper into the heart of cultural conversations”. This has historically been difficult due to access. Broadcasting will have been a big factor in the lower visibility of both ATP matches and the brand itself, something the launch of Sky Sports Tennis in the UK last February will surely hope to remedy, along with the new campaign.

But the new campaign also has another, slightly more existential task. It comes at an apt moment as men’s tennis enters a transitional phase, given many of the stars who defined the last 20 years of the men’s game – Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Andy Murray – have retired in the past two years. The tour will need to drum up interest in the current and emerging generation of players by carving out fresh personalities and rivalries.

The branding tackles this in an interesting way, opting for a typographically led approach that uses language and lettering to build energy and intensity, rather than banking solely on the names and faces of individual players to do the heavy lifting.

The design-led campaign visuals seem to borrow more from classic print advertising than your average sports campaign. “We purposefully set out to develop a different visual language that would help set the ATP Tour apart from the many, many other sports brands that use match footage,” says Wieden+Kennedy London creative director Juan Sevilla.

The agency’s production arm, WracK, helped to develop a suite of still visuals as well as motion executions inspired by the sport, where graphics are designed to mirror rallies and the movements of players on court. The campaign will play out across broadcast, digital and social media.

wklondon.com