YouTube TV partnered with ESPN, the leading sports network, and the National Basketball Association for a first of its kind partnership around the NBA Finals.

Since YouTube TV is still a relatively new brand in a young, emerging streaming market, it’s critical that we find ways of growing awareness, consideration, and buzz around our service. All of our insights have pointed towards marketing our live TV service to sports fans, during the biggest live sports moments. Therefore, we partnered with the NBA and ESPN to become the first and only presenting partner of the NBA Finals.

In order to break through with basketball fans, we set out to completely surround the moment and integrate ourselves within the moment in order to position ourselves as the best place to stream live TV. As the first ever presenting sponsor of the NBA Finals, we were able to achieve our goals by fully integrating with both the NBA and ESPN.

There is a great deal of fear involved in the decision to cut the cord. For our design target, the Sports Fan, this fear is driven primarily by access to the sports content that they love: they think that cable is the only way to get their sports, and in the absence of cable, they fear that they'll miss their game, or their team. We needed to assuage these fears. There is a great sports experience waiting for our design target on the other side, free of all of the downsides of cable that irritate and upset them - and we need to make our users both know and feel that - eg. we need to convince their minds and their hearts. By sponsoring the NBA Finals, we're both associating ourselves with what they love most - live sports - and showcasing our value prop in a unique way.

Our brand showed up consistently throughout the NBA Finals series. On broadcast through courtside signage, callouts, bumpers, rejoins, and commercials, including a :60 spot with creative cameos from Kevin Durant and ESPN broadcasters, real-time highlights, and seamless transition from the spot back to the game. Our 360 degree approach included a reminder on the Google homepage, ads on NBA, ESPN, and Bleacher Report’s digital and social properties, :30 basketball-themed ads on NBA TV, persistent messaging on YouTube’s homepage and app, :06 bumper ads on YouTube, SEM on Google, social mentions on Twitter. We also worked with over a dozen influencers to build the anticipation for the Finals across YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, including Rachel DeMita, a top YouTube creator, who was our official YouTube TV correspondent at the games, and ESPN’s studio analysts, who reminded fans to watch the NBA Finals on YouTube TV.

Not only did we see a surge of social impressions--2x our World Series sponsorship in 2017, but we also became the #1 most searched for live TV streaming service, saw our biggest day of traffic to our landing page, saw a 25x lift in search traffic for YouTube TV.