Overview:
Basketball never really stops, and neither does the need to give fans a reason to tune in.
Sport Design Australia partnered with ESPN across a series of NBA and NBL campaigns, developing creative around key moments including Christmas and New Year basketball, the NBL Championships and other major fixtures throughout the season.
Our role went beyond simply adapting existing ESPN assets. Across art direction, design, copy and video, we helped turn each moment into its own campaign idea, then built it out across the full range of channels and formats needed to reach fans.
Challenge:
With NBA and NBL content running throughout the year, ESPN needed to continually promote different games, competitions and broadcast moments without every campaign starting to feel the same.
Each brief came with its own story to tell, but still needed to sit comfortably within the wider ESPN brand.
There was also plenty competing for people's attention. Major basketball moments often sit alongside busy sporting periods, particularly across Christmas and New Year, so the creative needed to be simple enough to understand quickly, but strong enough to stand out across crowded social feeds and digital advertising.
And once we landed on the idea, it needed to work everywhere.
From a 30-second video and hero campaign artwork through to a six-second cutdown or small digital display banner, the creative had to retain the same idea and impact across very different formats.
Solution:
Rather than applying one campaign look across the entire basketball calendar, we approached each brief as its own creative opportunity.
Working within ESPN's established brand guidelines, we developed campaign concepts, art direction, headlines and copy around the story or moment we were trying to promote.
For Christmas and New Year basketball, that meant leaning into the occasion and finding ways to connect the festive period with the volume of basketball available to fans. For the NBL Championships and other major fixtures, the creative shifted to match the energy, stakes and story of the competition.
Once the direction was established, we built each idea into a complete campaign suite spanning hero artwork, organic and paid social, video, digital advertising and Google Display.
The challenge wasn't simply resizing the same piece of creative. Layouts, typography, imagery, copy and motion were adapted depending on the space available, ensuring the idea still worked whether someone encountered it as a full-screen video or a small display banner.
This gave ESPN a consistent campaign across every touchpoint, while still allowing each basketball moment to have its own personality.
Outcome:
Across the partnership, we created a broad suite of campaign creative supporting some of the biggest NBA and NBL moments on ESPN's calendar.
Campaigns were delivered across 6, 15 and 30-second video edits and 16:9, 4:5, 1:1 and 9:16 formats, alongside social, paid and digital display assets.
More importantly, ESPN had a creative partner that could take a brief from initial idea through to the full rollout - developing the campaign concept, art direction and copy before adapting it across every format required.
The result was a flexible approach that kept ESPN's basketball coverage consistent and recognisable, while giving individual games, competitions and moments their own reason to stand out.
