The National Basketball Association is often cited as one of the more innovative sports organisations and the Covid-enforced lockdown and shake-up of the sports industry really allowed it to hit its straps and do justice to that reputation.
If you’re a regular consumer of Sport Industry Awards content, you would have seen a question pop up on more than one occasion in our Q&A section.
That’s: “Which sports organisations – either local or international – do you believe are getting it right, in terms of marketing and commercialising their product, and why?”
It’s fair to say that the NBA popped up as an answer more regularly than any other, so I thought I’d check out why.
For starters, they seemed to embrace the challenge presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the major disruption it has caused to the past two NBA seasons, with a particular emphasis on maintaining fan engagement.
Working with its agency partners, when the 2019-2020 season was suspended, the NBA gathered over 70 ideas and synthesized them into concepts supporting video and editorial content (new ideas and new ways of showing historical content), contests and games, and activations. These concepts, according to agency Wunderman Thompson, covered three phases: ‘No Live Events’, ‘Games Without Fans’, and ‘The New Normal’.
One of the NBA’s first masterstrokes was to bring forward the release of ‘The Last Dance’, a 10-part documentary from Netflix and ESPN trailing the final season played by Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in 1997 and 1998. Live audiences for new episodes on ESPN in the US hovered around the six million mark, which was comparable to, or even in excess of, actual NBA basketball on the network. It also played a big role in growing a new NBA audience.
Also, while games were paused, the NBA app featured curated historical content and virtual content using real games from the esports NBA2K league. When the season resumed, the NBA app launched with new features including chat-based watch parties, trivia contests, and ‘Tap to Cheer’, which not only helped fans feel a part of the live game, but also lit up the arena with light and sound to support the players.
As a result, the NBA saw no loss of subscriptions and viewership remained on a steady increase.
The numbers bear this out, according to Wunderman Thompson:
- 20 billion: total video views for 2019/20 – an increase of 17%
- 1 billion: video views across all NBA digital platforms during the NBA finals
Overall, those figures were bolstered by the NBA’s restart as the league recorded 6.9 billion video views on its social channels following its return on 30 July 2020 inside the bio-secure bubble the league set up in Orlando, including 2.6 billion on Instagram.
YouTube, meanwhile, delivered 321 million views of NBA content during the post-season, with 61 million coming during the finals, according to sportspromedia.com.
The digital media figures were welcome news for the NBA following a significant drop in its TV viewership during its return to play.
The NBA went on to unveil a series of digital and broadcast innovations ahead of the start of the 2020-21 season at the end of last year.
These include a redesigned NBA app and NBA.com, enhanced optionality on digital platforms, additional alternative streams for select games within NBA League Pass, interactive game overlays, the ability to temporarily download games for offline viewing, and more options to “enhance the multi-platform experience”.
Alternative streams included ‘NBABet Streams’, in which fans in the United States had the opportunity to watch alternate betting-focused broadcasts for select games on NBA League Pass and NBA TV. There was also expert analysis, while overlays featuring betting odds were displayed throughout the match-ups.
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There was also a ‘Sideline Stream’, which included popular alternate angles such as ‘Rail Cam’ and ‘Courtside Cam’, whilst the ‘Influencers Stream’ included influencers and media personalities engaging fans across social media during their weekly game calls on NBA League Pass.
With regards alternative audio, fans in the US had access to expanded language options, including Portuguese, Spanish and Korean.
Speaking of audio, the NBA also put 30 microphones under the court to test different sound optics.
In addition, there was also new and enhanced interactive game overlays entertaining fans with stats, quizzes, polls and in-game highlights, downloadable games for viewing offline, and on-the-go for League Pass subscribers, as well as condensed games on NBA League Pass, which were expanded to include game highlights dedicated to the home team, away team and all possessions.
“Before the pandemic and to this day, our most important priority is to make sure our live-game broadcasts keep up with the rapidly changing media environment,” said Amy Brooks, the NBA’s Chief Innovation Officer, who oversees innovation initiatives across four leagues — the NBA, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), the NBA G League (minor league), and the esports NBA 2K League.
According to Brooks, the NBA used the difficulties of the pandemic as an opportunity to experiment.
“We know that in the future our fans will want to watch the game in a personalized and easily accessible way, so we had been exploring that for a while,” she said. “Then, all of a sudden, we had to find a new way to bring the game to our global fans. We only had one broadcast location. What could we do that was new and different? Virtual fans, in partnership with Microsoft, was probably the most visible result. We placed live video images of fans in the stands behind the players.”
Further NBA innovation included HomeCourt, which is a mobile AI app that tracks an individual’s shots and dribbles. During the pandemic, it tracked more than a billion dribbles and 100 million shots globally. According to Brooks, “it gamifies dribbling”, but aside from fans, it is helping the NBA address the challenge of scouting basketball players globally, which is challenging to scale. So, it developed NBA Global Scout with HomeCourt, which can test an individual’s vertical leap, lateral quickness, height etc. Using this, the NBA scouted its first player from Indonesia, who subsequently joined the NBA Global Academy.
Excitingly, for fans in Africa, the NBA has the continent firmly in its sights.
According to Brooks, “we have been investing more in Africa lately” and this in the wake of the NBA already launching the Basketball Africa League a couple of years ago.
“We are excited about this, because of the growth potential in Africa and the nature of younger African fans,” said Brooks, speaking in 2020. “Fifty-five players in our leagues were either born in Africa or have at least one parent from Africa, so we see the confluence of those factors as a huge opportunity.”
But, perhaps a final word from Brooks on NBA innovation and the strategy behind it.
“Getting new things done is always challenging,” she says. “The hardest is identifying the right time to market, because the inclination is to do things fast, but you need to prove something is a good idea. You only can prove that by waiting to get enough information, so finding the balance between those two is tricky. We tend to balance data with instinct and input from our owners.”
Here’s betting on the NBA to get that timing just right, more often than not.
Dylan Rogers
