Being the Official Beer of the NBA and creating ULTRA Courtside wasn't enough. To fully immerse themselves into NBA culture, Michelob ULTRA had to do more around fashion, sneakers and more.

Partnering with an icon like Tinker Hatfield, who designed several of Michael Jordan’s iconic shoes and helped usher in the NBA’s love affair with sneakers, was the way to do that.

Our objectives were to become a worthy sponsor of the NBA, one that consumers could come to expect during their experiences with the league, and to garner conversation and buzz around Michelob ULTRA's efforts to embed themselves in the league's culture.

Michelob ULTRA collabed with sneaker legend Tinker Hatfield to create a champion bottle, then drop it like the season’s hottest sneaker release with an NBA twist – it couldn’t be bought, only won.

The parallels between a sneaker drop and dropping our bottle during a big NBA cultural moment were too obvious to ignore. We had to mirror our campaign like the drops that NBA fans and sneakerheads are so accustomed to.

Our campaign and rollout reflected this through every touch point, from tease, to launch/drop.

For fans, sneakers are at the heart of NBA culture, and at the heart of sneaker culture are collabs. By creating a championship bottle that would be beloved by both cultures, we’d connect ULTRA to NBA diehards, casuals, and new fans too.

These synergies all combined to help us connect to all the key passions of NBA fans to Michelob ULTRA's efforts to be one with NBA culture.

Since becoming the official beer of the NBA, ULTRA has created special-edition championship bottles for the NBA Finals. We sought to improve them by harnessing the swag and culture of the NBA. So instead of doing our dated, traditional NBA Championship bottle, we got the biggest legend in sneakers, Tinker Hatfield to design our bottle.

We treated the release like a sneaker drop, teasing it with a live unboxing, building hype with Tinker Hatfield’s first-ever Reddit AMA, and then dropping it at the NBA Championship game’s final buzzer. We released 105 in honor of the winning team’s final score. In true sneaker-drop fashion, over 100,00 fans competed for them on a first come, first served basis. Beyond sports media, the drop was covered in culture- forward media outlets like Complex, Hypebeast, Dime and others, but thanks to the Tinker collab, those outlets were eager to cover the drop.

The Tinker Championship bottle helped Michelob ULTRA go from sitting outside of the top 10 NBA sponsors, in terms of social mentions, to rising to the #2 most-talked- about brand following the ’20-’21 season.

There were over 100 stories and 40 million PR impressions, with culture-forward outlets such as Complex and Hypebeast leading the way.

Michelob ULTRA was also able to hijack the NBA Finals by becoming a Top 10 Trending Topic during the series, and racking up 15K social mentions in the three hours following the game.

The collaboration and sneaker-drop–like campaign cemented Michelob ULTRA as a worthy sponsor of the NBA, all while entrenching their place in NBA culture along the way.