The NBA is a star-driven league and the stars were certainly out in this year’s NBA Finals rematch between the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs. In the ultimately uneven five-game battle that left the Spurs NBA champions on Sunday night, the league leveraged high-profile names both on the court and in the studio as well as coming up with some integrative social media initiatives to draw viewers to the Finals.

ABC analysts Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose have developed an entertaining reportee in recent years with their playful banter both on NBA Countdown and online as part of Simmons B.S. Report video podcasts. The two teamed up earlier this month for a series of 15-second ads that aired on YouTube prior to Game 1 of the Finals.

“The idea came about as an innovative way to reach the NBA core viewers who we know spend a lot of time on YouTube,” said ESPN Director of Marketing Michael Kopech in an email. “We tailored pre-roll creative specifically to the video genre that the user is attempting to watch…Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose have a ton of equity in the online space.”

One spot was customized to run just prior to video-game content, while another looks like a movie trailer and runs in advance of movie trailers on YouTube. The ads were created to try to reach NBA fans in real time and not while they were watching TV, ESPN Senior VP of Marketing Aaron Taylor told the Wall Street Journal prior to the Finals.

ESPN also has re-enlisted artist Richard Swarbrick for a series of Vine animations depicting some of the greatest moments of the playoffs, like Manu Ginobili’s fourth-quarter three-pointer in Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals. Swarbrick created an animation of a determined-looking LeBron James driving to the basket as a promo for the Finals on ABC just before the series began and has been creating a new animation based off a key highlight from each game.

ESPN also teamed up with Columbia Pictures and MGM to cross-promote the Finals and summer blockbuster hopeful 22 Jump Street, which premiered on Friday, June 13. In a series of spots that are airing during the Finals, NBA legends Moses Malone and Julius Erving chatted with the movie’s stars Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum and Ice Cube.

“We worked very closely with the NBA on all of our postseason efforts, especially the Finals,” says Kopech. “We collaborated with them so that, creatively, there was a consistent look and feel across everything we did, regardless of whether it was running in the league’s media or ours.”

On the league side, the NBA increased its already high level of social-media interactivity around the Finals with “NBA Facebook Live,” which lets fans ask players questions during media availability for practices. The service allows fans to submit questions through Facebook or Instagram for players from both teams.

Internationally, the NBA took full advantage of the global market with 16 new international partners broadcasting the games for the first time. The Finals logo signage, which appears court side, was translated into seven different languages for the first time. Those languages included Hindi, Japanese and Mandarin.

The league also hosted four viewing parties around the world in collaboration with some of its largest partners. Solar Entertainment hosted a viewing party at the newly-opened NBA Cafe in Manila; ESPN hosted in Sydney, Australia as well as at WOWOW and D2C in Tokyo; and a Coors Light viewing party in Mexico featured former NBA player Cedric Ceballos, the Laker girls and NBA mascots.

NBA.com/Mexico just launched ahead of the Finals, giving the league 18 international NBA.com sites with editorial content in local languages.

Here at home, ratings for the Finals have so far been up a touch from last year, with the NBA reporting a 5 percent increase in viewership through the first three games. As expected, the games have given ABC the win each night they’ve aired and after Game 1 gave Jimmy Kimmel the lead in he needed to beat an original episode of “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” for the first time, though Fallon still easily won the week overall.

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