The NBA was embarking on its 75th Anniversary Season and was looking to engage its fans and increase brand affinity through its “NBA 75” and “NBA Lane” campaigns.

Amid a landscape of increasing audience viewership fragmentation across linear, social and digital platforms, they also faced increasing competition from the NFL which shifted its schedule around, and created head-to-head competition on key tentpole days such as Christmas and MLK Day.

We were tasked with helping the league reach beyond core fans and translate the excitement for the 75th Anniversary Season into start-of-season incremental live game tune-in and brand favorability.

Our objectives were clear - raise awareness for the 75th anniversary, build brand affinity by using both the history and the future outlook of the league to inspire a media strategy designed to create a halo-effect around the campaign to boost viewership with both lifelong and casual fans alike.

This initiative was designed to connect core fans, but also go beyond and resonate with those who find the culture of the NBA irresistible, especially if they haven’t been regularly watching games.

With heightened attention as our mantra, we applied this challenge to four key aspects of our media strategy:

- Ensure we provide tune-in details exactly when our fans are likely to find them most useful, 2 days prior to each game when 75+% of people determine their entertainment options.

- Deliver a customized invitation to our games with dynamic creative based on age and Fandom (Core vs Casual)

- Find a way to infiltrate other sports broadcasts currently restricted for the NBA

- Find a way to attribute Adelaide Attention Units to tune-in (instead of impressions or conversions) across every channel, tactic, and creative as the campaign was running rather than afterwards

Brand assets were created that eliminated tune-in details. This simple move bucked restrictions and got the NBA inserted directly into broadcasts like NFL Sunday and the MLB World Series.

Linear TV & CTV anchored the campaign while targeted digital with tune-in details built frequency.

OOH activations in key markets, and takeovers of culturally relevant sites like Complex, Snapchat and Instagram led up to and ran right on our tip-off date.

We turned our digital community into reality by creating the NBA Lane experience at ComplexCon, creating a space for fans to talk about all things NBA.

Finally, we developed a bespoke partnership with Data+Math to tag and measure all inventory, quantifying contribution by each audience via attribution models and became the first brand ever to dynamically optimize tune-in by correlating it directly to attention to our ads in real-time, and attribute performance down to the placement.

- ATTENTION

o Adelaide Attention Units grew 10%, 11-15% above industry benchmarks in key content categories, Adelaide

- TUNE IN

o 1.2MM incremental viewers to the 10/19 Tip-off, Data+Math

? 50% higher than projections & 3x higher than previous season.

o Those exposed to campaign were 3x more likely to tune-in, Adelaide

o ESPN viewership was +20% over 2020 opening night, Nielsen

o TNT viewership was +16% over 2019 opening night, Nielsen

o P2+ share of NBA games during the flight (10/19 – 11/7) was NBA’s highest since 2003, Nielsen/NBA

- BRAND HEALTH

o Favorability increased 24% among Core Fans (to over 95%), Dynata

o 75th anniversary Awareness increased 10% among Sports Fans by Tip-off, Dynata

- CULTURAL IMPACT

o The term “NBA” was the largest year-over-year search term increase on Google for 2021, demonstrating the campaign’s impact in expanding and exciting its new fan base, Google Search Trends 2021