The transmission of the 22/23 season of the league on ESPN has six sponsors: Bradesco, Ford, Sadia, Samsung, Subway and Vivo
The globalization of media allows people to have access to traces of cultures from other parts of the globe in a simple click of the screens and, if once Brazil was the country of soccer, it is currently possible to include several more sports in that list, including basketball. . No wonder, the country hosted the NBA House, an event dedicated to basketball fans that took place between June 2nd and 19th, at Shopping Eldorado.
The kickoff of the 2022/2023 season of the NBA, the main professional basketball league in North America, took place in the second week of October and, for the 31st consecutive year, ESPN is the broadcaster responsible for bringing the four lines and bottles of the sport to the subscribers’ homes.
During the broadcasts of the six decisive NBA games last season, ESPN surpassed the average audience recorded in 2020 by 130% and, according to Kantar Ibope Media, all matches played between the Golden State Warriors and Boston Celtics were in the Top 5 of the ranking of audience in transmission schedules.
In addition, in the 21/22 season, the broadcaster registered a positive response from the audience, reaching a 27% increase in the female audience and 37% in the audience of generation Z, compared to the previous year.
For this year, the station has six broadcast sponsors, namely Bradesco, Ford, Sadia, Samsung, Subway and Vivo and, even without having sold all the spaces dedicated to the brands, ESPN saw a 15% increase in its revenue , according to Giselle Ghinsberg, head of DASP at Disney Brasil.
Last season was one of the best in basketball on ESPN, commercially speaking. We closed all sponsorship quotas that year. For this season, even though we have not yet sold all the spaces, we managed to increase our revenue by 15%. This is the result of the market’s confidence in Disney in the production of sports content, said the executive.
Over the course of 128 matches, the brands still have plenty of space to have their logos stamped on one of the main and most famous sports in the world. According to Giselle, the station’s commercial project for the NBA involves not only the transmission of linear games, but also the expansion of digital coverage, on ESPN’s networks and on the station’s partners. This year we have new special formats for live games and greater interaction between brands in programs that cover the sport in the media, he added.
Unlike what happens in the United States, home of the league, where brands have the opportunity to work directly with the teams, sponsoring local broadcasts, having insertions in the arenas and using the sports stars in their favor, Brazilian brands they have the charisma and good humor of those who translate the sport to the population.
ESPN, known for having big names in sports narration in its programming, has the help of names like Rmulo Mendona to get closer to basketball fans.
Here we work with basketball fans in general in mind, and we seek to be creative in our actions, with the members of our broadcasting team as central pieces in the activations. Rmulo Mendona, narrator for the Disney channels, is one of the main voices of the NBA in Brazil and has a lot of identification with the community. Since last season, Sadia has chosen him as the brand’s poster child to announce new products, an action worked on during last season’s finals, pointed out Giselle.