The NBA is one of the largest live sports properties within the ESPN portfolio, acting as both a critical viewership pillar for the business overall and growth avenue looking towards the future of the company. To maximize the NBA's cultural pull, ESPN uses their NBA on ESPN Time creative platform to elevate the story unfolding on the court every season and navigate fans from tip-off to the NBA Finals. The 2023 season is the fourth installment of this platform, so we were tasked with finding a new way to effectively bring people into the NBA experience with a nuanced, visual approach, able to tell the season's story with insightful specificity.

The 2022 - 2023 season was set to be the beginning of basketball's first golden age since the time of Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, but the NBA was still struggling to attract more viewers than the NFL. ESPN had to tell viewers just how special this season was going to be. "It's a beautiful time for basketball" was the idea that their coverage of the NBA would be built on. A highly visual campaign depicting a hyper surreal basketball utopia, that served as a metaphor for the incredible talents of veteran superstars like LeBron James, sharing the court with young, emerging stars like Jayson Tatum.

In our research we found fans equated their love for the NBA and its players similar to pop culture's relationship with Marvel and its superheroes: giant personalities, epic rivalries, and epic battles. We leveraged this year-over-year approach in each phase of our work, celebrating the current fan's bond with the NBA and inviting new fans into the experience. This approach allows ESPN to retain current viewership and win over new fans with equal importance. Specifically for the 2022 - 2023 season, we focused on a unique, "Rare Air" moment in the league — a time when fans were excited to witness a changing of the guard throughout the NBA, with young players quickly becoming the new faces of the league while traditional franchise names begin to fade into retirement.

Coming off the heels of a 2021-2022 NBA season, where viewership grew more than it had in years, our "Beautiful Time" anthems had a high bar to meet. Year over year, the "NBA on ESPN Time" platform performed well as it maintained the high viewership from the year prior, retaining its core base of fans throughout the regular season. Retention was key this season because for the first time ever the NFL was going to compete for viewership on Christmas Day — which historically had been owned outright by the NBA — and ESPN was going to cover more NFL games as their season expanded with extra competition. All in all, retention was a huge success when taking into account how much the NFL dominates ratings in the US, even when the NBA season briefly overlaps.