Zambezi created the Timberwolves’ “Bring the Nice” campaign.
In sports, you’ve got to take advantage of your chances. That was the case over the past month as Coors Light and MLB each moved quickly to capitalize on fleeting or unpredictable events on the field. We also saw AT&T appeal to soccer’s many fan tribes and two fresh takes on basketball—one that updated a classic song and another that redefined a popular Midwest truism.
Below, we recap the top sports-centric campaigns from the past few weeks.
DoorDash, an official NBA and WNBA partner, celebrated the tipoff of the NBA season by remaking Kurtis Blow’s hit song “Basketball,” 40 years after its debut. A video featuring appearances by New York Knicks players Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart, WNBA legend Sue Bird and Brooklyn rapper Lola Brooke highlights the evolution of the game. The video, shot by Dave Meyers and his daughter Cassidy in New York, marks Kurtis Blow’s first music video in more than 25 years. The project comes from Superette, DoorDash’s in-house creative team. The delivery company is using its NBA association this year to highlight a membership program bringing members-only experiences and opportunities to save.
Mia Hamm plays a know-it-all soccer mom in a spot for AT&T, a longtime sponsor of U.S. soccer, MLS and the Mexican national team. “Soccer Fans Club,” created by agencies Dieste, Critical Mass and BBDO, highlights how the telecommunications provider brings connectivity to tribes of soccer fans—those who rise for early-morning broadcasts from overseas, those who wear soccer kits just for style and Hamm’s group of soccer moms.
Days after Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Russell Wilson name-checked Coors Light in an Oct. 20 game, the brand was there to capitalize. Along with agencies Droga5 and Rethink, and with help from Phaedon, Coors Light whipped up a suite of creative activations in time for the Steelers’ Oct. 28 game, including a recut commercial and custom cans referencing Wilson’s “Coors Light! Coors Light!” audible. A similar phenomenon popped up with another Steelers quarterback six years ago, when Ben Roethlisberger called “Dilly Dilly,” a famous Bud Light ad catchphrase.
Coors Light has no marketing relationship with Wilson or the Steelers.
“If it was Patrick Mahomes, I would have understood,” said Molson Coors VP of Marketing Marcelo Pascoa, referring to the famed Kansas City quarterback who’s a well-known Coors Light supporter.
More: Why Patrick Mahomes and Coors Light buried an ad
“An iconic brand like Coors Light especially thrives when there’s a rare moment in culture like this, and it’s exciting to make most of those moments at the same speed with which it came,” said Scott Bell, chief creative officer at Droga5 New York.
After it got namechecked in a quarterback audible, Coors Light moved quickly to surround Pittsburgh's next game.
With the two largest TV markets and several of the game’s biggest stars, the New York Yankees-Los Angeles Dodgers World Series was something of a bicoastal dream matchup. Hyping the event was left to a new agency, Good Sports Creative, which developed a brand film fusing highlights set to a mashup of East Coast and West Coast sounds—“California Love” by Tupac Shakur and Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind.”
Good Sports was founded by Josh Bogdan, who previously worked on MLB’s “Baseball is Something Else” campaign while at Wieden+Kennedy. “Empire State of California Love” went from concept to finished product in nine days and was “an absolute feat for the music licensing team at MLB,” Bogdan said.
Shoveling a neighbor’s driveway when they’re out of town? That’s Minnesota nice. Humiliating an opposing forward with a slam dunk to the hail of intimidating cheers from the home crowd? That’s Minnesota niiice. A new campaign for the Minnesota Timberwolves from Zambezi invites players and NBA fans to “Bring the Nice” and demonstrate the evolving definition of “nice.” Basketball fans will no doubt recognize that “bring the nice” shares similarities with “bring ya ass,” the colorful invitation Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards delivered to Charles Barkley during a live interview last spring on TNT.
