A new NBA Finals campaign starts Tuesday, at a critical time for the league and its new CMO -

As the NBA scans the chaotic TV and streaming landscape, amid rapidly shifting technologies and consumer viewing habits, it’s relying on a veteran direct-to-consumer marketing executive to help keep fans engaged and to help find new ones.

The league announced in late October that it had hired Tammy Henault as its chief marketing officer. She previously worked at Paramount Global, overseeing the consumer marketing effort for the Paramount+ subscription streaming service rollout.

Henault, 40, said she has spent much of her first season learning about the nuances of the NBA, its fans, media partners, and how it all fits within the wild west of a content delivery ecosystem. She began her role on Nov. 21.

It’s an important job because the NBA is poised for a new set of media rights deals in coming years that the league hopes results in tens of billions of dollars in new revenue. Using marketing campaigns to convince fans of different generations to sustain viewership of live games and other content across a multitude of technologies is critical for Adam Silver and his lieutenants in their quest to monetize the NBA’s fans.

Her first major NBA marketing effort debuts Tuesday. The Henault-helmed campaign is called “We Are All in the Finals” and was produced by Brooklyn-based creative agency Translation.

Planning, she said, began at the end of last year. “This has been the creative I’ve had the most impact on from a marketing perspective,” Henault said.

Featured in the multi-spot TV and social campaign are South Korean rapper and NBA ambassador Suga (of the boy band BTS), skateboarder Tony Hawk, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, and retired NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning. Oh, and a couple of guys named Magic Johnson and Larry Bird (and their championship rings) are in the campaign, too.

Normally, the finals marketing would begin closer to the end of the playoffs, but the league opted to go earlier this season. The TV spot, narrated by actor John Malkovich, debuts at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday during Game 5 of Celtics-Sixers on TNT and will be all over the league’s social media accounts and its app.

“We’re looking to really raise awareness while the playoffs are still going,” Henault said. Game 1 of the NBA Finals is set for 8:30 p.m. June 1 on ABC, and a potential Game 7 series-ender would be 8 p.m. June 18.

The finals are one of the major tentpole events around which the NBA deploys dedicated marketing campaigns. The start of the season is another such inflection point, along with the Christmas Day games, All-Star Game, the new in-season tournaments, and the draft.

The Christmas Day games represent a unique marketing challenge for Henault and the NBA. Last year, the league aired five games simulcast on ABC and ESPN that averaged 4.3 million viewers overall (up 5 percent over 2021) while the NFL, long the king of U.S. TV viewership, had a triple-header for the first time on the holiday that averaged nearly 23 million viewers.

While that looks one-sided, the numbers were excellent for both leagues (which have vastly different numbers of regular-season games, which partly dictates the wide gulf in audience average).

Henault was just a month into her NBA role at Christmastime, but she quickly digested the meaning of the viewership data.

“What we’ve found, there’s room for both of us,” she said. “Fans expect us on Christmas. We’re able to keep those fans with us.”

While the audience numbers for a specific day are less important than the overall averages and age demographic specifics, it’s important for the NBA to sustain its tentpole viewership as it prepares for its upcoming national media rights talks. Direct-to-consumer (aka streaming) is expected to be a major component of the new deals that will begin after the 2024-2025 season.

The current set of deals with Disney-owned ESPN and with Turner Sports are worth $24 billion long-term, and the new deals are expected to be worth significantly more — which is especially important as the NBA figures out how to offset potential financial losses from the failing regional sports network business that delivers most of its live game content in the regular season.

While the media deals are outside of Henault’s role, helping drive viewership aids the NBA’s long-term financial health that relies on such rights contracts. The media and streaming giants want to pay for something they know will draw eyeballs.

And it’s not just yelling at fans to watch games at a certain time on a particular network.

Sports marketing, especially for the major leagues, has evolved beyond just TV commercials, newspaper and magazine ads, billboards, and highlight clips from games. Henault said the league will continue to meet fans where they are beyond games on TV, in places such as fashion and video games — spaces the league believes are “endemically aligned” with the game and its players, she said.

“What we’ve found, there’s room for both of us,” Tammy Henault says of the NBA co-existing with the NFL on Christmas Day. (Juan Pablo Rico / Sipa USA via AP)

She also will play a key role in the NBA’s effort to engage directly with fans, which clearly is among the reasons the league recruited her.

“As the NBA continues to prioritize our direct-to-consumer offerings, we are excited for Tammy to join our team and help us forge meaningful connections with NBA fans around the world,” said her direct boss, NBA deputy commissioner and COO Mark Tatum, in a statement about her hiring.

Consumer marketing is in her corporate DNA: The league hired her away from Paramount Global, where she was the most recent senior vice president of marketing for the Paramount+ subscription streaming service, overseeing its 2021 rebrand and launch as part of her eight years at the company. Prior to that, Henault was managing director of consumer marketing for digital products at The New York Times (which owns The Athletic).

As part of that direct fan engagement role, one of Henault’s tasks is to market the free NBA ID program that functions as a loyalty rewards and perks program and gives the league access to a database of its most hardcore fans willing to engage NBA content. It’s now part of the revamped NBA App that also now includes access to the League Pass subscription package of live games and access to NBA TV.

“It’s a massive priority,” she said.

Henault replaced Kate Jhaveri, who jumped from Amazon-owned Twitch to the NBA in 2019 and left in November to become TikTok’s head of global marketing.

As a marketer, Henault speaks about the “customer journey,” which is how businesses often describe someone’s end-to-end engagement with their product or service. For the NBA, that’s not only consumption of live games on a local or national TV channel or streaming service, but also their engagement around events like the draft, All-Star Game, merchandise and apparel, wagering, highlights, video games, shoulder programming, and content on social media and the league’s app, etc.

Keeping people engaged with content and spending their time and money on the NBA is central to Henault’s role (and those of the CMOs at the 30 teams, who do such things locally), but also creating new fans by marketing the league’s teams and stars.

While battling fan churn isn’t easy, it’s not as if the NBA requires building up from a foundation. The league is already hugely popular.

“It’s staggering to know we drive over 1 million viewers 200 nights a year,” Henault said.

Her gig also includes oversight of the NBA’s international marketing. Of the U.S. major leagues, the NBA leads them all in overseas fan affinity in terms of watching games and highlights and buying licensed merchandise.

“Billions of people consume NBA content,” Henault said.

Keeping them consuming requires fresh creative for marketing, she said.

“How is this different than what we’ve done for prior seasons?” she said of her marketing mission going forward.

While most future plans are still in development and wraps, one fun piece of the finals marketing centers around not a player but a piece of hardware: The Larry O’Brien Trophy is being put on public tour, making high-profile stops with celebs and at events such as the Kentucky Derby, Miami Grand Prix, Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, and at Disney World.

The “Larry’s NBA Finals 2023 Bucket List” even has a new Twitter account showing off various celebs holding the trophy.

Already know The Big Diesel, now I can say I’ve met Vin Diesel! #F1Miami pic.twitter.com/EIj8SotN6m

— The Larry O’Brien Trophy (@nbafinalstrophy) May 7, 2023

“We have a lot of fun storytelling up our sleeves,” Henault said.

Ultimately, marketing can do only so much to grow viewership and fan affinity. For something like the NBA Finals, audience numbers will be dictated as much or more by what happens on the court. The teams and star players involved, storylines, tip-off times, competition on other channels, thrillers versus routs, series length and other factors ultimately drive audience numbers.

Last year’s six-game Warriors-Celtics series averaged 12.4 million viewers on ABC, its best metric since pre-pandemic 2019. And the league’s regular season averaged just shy of 1.6 million viewers on its three national TV networks — where it’s generally been since the peak of 3.1 million in 1998-99 (while today accounting for a greater share of a smaller pool of prime-time TV viewers).

With this year’s NBA playoffs getting some great TV numbers, including 9.8 million for Game 1 of Warriors-Kings on ESPN for the best Round 1 audience since 1999 and then Game 2 of Lakers-Warriors last week averaging 7.35 million on ESPN for the best early-round cable average since 2012, there’s reason to think this year’s finals could see a healthy audience rebound.

“I continued to be so surprised at the power and reach of the brand,” Henault said.

Additional Reading

(Top image of Larry Bird: Screenshot from NBA TV spot)

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