Storytelling

New York Knicks

Linsanity! & Building The Fan-Player Connection Through Storytelling

Challenge

Developing breakthrough creative that drives fan engagement and emotional attachment

Background

My favorite component of running marketing for a professional sports team was having so many different tools and channels to reach fans. This enabled far-reaching, multi-touchpoint 360 degree campaigns that organically took new shapes as the story of the season unfolded.

While I owned the core brand/creative responsibilities (brand development, brand marketing and advertising), managed our internal Knicks design team, and an amazing group of freelancers and agencies, this was only the tip of the spear. The other components I oversaw in marketing played invaluable and complementary roles:

Event Presentation — the in-arena experience for each game was the most visible and impactful — the music, entertainment, video that maximized fan engagement and excitement.

Digital marketing through the Knicks Now content creation team and online/social distribution network.

Experiential marketing — the team that created and executed blockbluster events (e.g., takeovers of Grand Central, rallies in NYC parks, gameday VIP experiences, etc.)

Community Relations — leveraging players and alumni to reach out to fans and kids around the city via youth programs, events, leagues, etc.

Each year, we would align all of these channels behind marketing campaigns that captured the unique aspects of that season’s Knicks team, its individual players, and the current mindset of fans.

What follows next is the story of the advertising campaign I developed for my favorite Knicks team during my time at MSG. The season has been dubbed “Linsanity,” and for a brief period of time put the Knicks and Madison Square Garden at center stage of the entire sports world.

The Players

One of my roles overseeing marketing for the New York Knicks was serving as the liaison between business operations and basketball operations. I worked directly with basketball operations to secure time with players for photo shoots, content generation, marketing and sponsorship events, etc.

This provided me an opportunity to get to know the Knicks players, their personalities, and appreciate their personal journeys. Knowing how each player got to where they were, their mindset, and their passion, deepens your bond. As a marketer, my responsibility was to make the players’ stories real for the fans.

The Fans

It has been close to 50 years since the Knicks won their last championship. In the past 20 years, the Knicks have been to the playoffs only five times, winning just one series. Despite the lack of recent success on the court, the passion of the fan base and the electricity of Madison Square Garden is awe-inspiring 

Ask the greatest players in basketball history from Jordan to LeBron – and they will tell you that there is something unique about playing in The World’s Most Famous Arena. From my vantage point as a sports fan, there is nothing that compares to the energy and electricity of being in Madison Square Garden during the 4th quarter of a close game.

The Marketing Campaign

The goal of the campaign was straightforward — develop breakthrough creative that captured this Knicks team, its connection to fans, and the raw emotion of Knicks basketball at Madison Square Garden. The campaign would launch at the climax of the season, right before and during one of the Knicks’ rare playoff appearances. What we didn’t know at the time was that we would be creating and filming the campaign as one of the most unusual lightning-in-a-bottle moments in recent sports history transpired. 

When we began developing this campaign, our focus was on the three Knicks stars — all players with amazing back stories: Amar’e Stoudemire, the first true megastar the franchise had in a decade; Brooklyn-born Carmelo Anthony, one of the league’s top 10 players; and Tyson Chandler, a fan favorite and former #1 overall draft pick who had recently landed in New York.

What we hadn’t expected was the biggest Cinderella basketball story in a generation. Jeremy Lin – an undrafted, unheralded, Harvard-educated, journeyman who was the last player on the Knicks roster -shook the foundation of New York City and the entire basketball world over a few inspiring weeks. With injuries decimating the Knicks roster, Jeremy took over games with his hustle, scoring, and playmaking. Dubbed Linsanity, this moment in time earned Jeremy the unprecedented honor of two consecutive Sports Illustrated covers. By chance, we were filming our campaign as it all occurred.

Solution — Creating The Campaign

At the time of the campaign, I was particularly intrigued by some of the advertising work that Under Armour was doing – capturing the emotion of sports through sound design and candid photography. I reached out to the freelance director of their latest ad campaign and presented a comprehensive creative brief on a proposed Knicks project. He eagerly agreed to fly to New York to work with me to develop our ad campaign.

My idea was to create personalized ads for each of the Knicks three (and soon to be four stars). The ads would tell the stories of their long journeys to New York, capturing their charismatic on-court and off-court personas, and showcase the unique, raw, emotional energy of players and fans at Madison Square Garden.

Over the next few weeks, the two of us worked around the clock to bring this vision to life. Simultaneously Jeremy Lin and his remarkable story unfolded. To capture the fan perspective and the grittiness of MSG, we shot game footage on the court using a cinematic, high-definition RED camera. 

We wrote scripts to capture each of the four players’ individual stories, meeting with each player to ensure we fully expressed their personas. We filmed intimate closeups as each player voiced his story’s narration.

The final component was finding the perfect music (and licensing it) to bring the stories to life and cutting each score in :30 and :60 versions to optimize emotion.

Results

The end product of this collaboration was remarkable, assisted by the serendipity of filming the right campaign at the right time.  What instantly pops up when watching the spots is that Linsanity was not only larger than life for the fans but also for the players. Through Jeremy’s emotion and expression captured in the candid footage, you can see the magnitude of the moment through his eyes.

I knew we were onto something when I got a call from Amare Stoudemire’s marketing team who marveled that we had captured his essence in a way that no other brand had previously done.

We were able to showcase the spots throughout the playoff run, both on-air and in-area, before tip-off to get fans fired up.  Looking back, the ads are a time capsule back to a special time in Knicks and New York history.

The following season (see below), when the Knicks had their most successful season in over a decade, we returned to this formula and used a similar style of music + RED camera footage in our playoff ad campaign.