Christopher Carroll

The NBA season has recently started and there will be another 8 months until a team is crowned NBA Champion. That means there are 8 months of incoming NBA advertising campaigns, starting with the first set of campaigns that I have seen. The NBA and its broadcasters have tried to appeal to younger audiences in recent years using famous rap songs and rappers in order to increase viewership. The most recent campaign features Migos, an Atlanta based rap group known for hit songs like T-Shirt and Bad and Boujee, rapping about the NBA match-ups that are happening early in the season. I think it is an interesting campaign that may be missing its target audience base. The age demographic for Migos are millennials and younger generations, which I find odd because young people do not watch television with the same frequency that older generations do. So the broadcasters are using Migos to bring in younger viewers who aren’t watching the television in the first place, so there is less of a chance that the demographic they are targeting will see the marketing campaign. It is also interesting because older generations that watch television generally do not listen to Migos so they miss the actual audience of the programming too. It seems like the people making the marketing decisions are using outdated tools to reach out to a younger generation that won’t see the campaign as frequently as the marketers would like.

The NBA is however growing faster than any of the other four major sports leagues (NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB) so they must be doing something right. This is shown in a Gallup news poll. I am not entirely sure how this is working. It is very fascinating that the NBA can have a somewhat disjointed marketing campaign formula that has been followed over the past few seasons and that it continues to grow quicker than other sports. I think this may have to do with the NBA’s willingness to embrace social media as an avenue to bring in fans. The NBA is thinking about the future and the next generation of sports fans in a time when the NFL tries to hold on to the past. The NFL instilled a rule in 2016 stating that teams could not post in-game videos to their social media pages during games. This rule was changed after seven weeks because teams were unhappy with the rule. This shows that the NFL is not thinking about the future, they are just thinking about the present, while they are stuck in the past. The NBA is taking full advantage of all of the available platforms to grow and improve the visibility of the sport. This is why even if the television campaign is a little awkward the NBA can still thrive.

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