An AI-powered player discovery and dream team experience.

Creating a gamified experience which brings NBA fans even closer to the league and its history, celebrating its 75th anniversary through emerging technology.

The challenge

With the NBA celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2022, their broadcast partner Turner Sports, part of WarnerMedia, approached us with a unique brief; how could they help drive discovery and celebration of the past 75 years, through the use of emerging technology?

We needed to ideate rapidly, so leveraged ‘Triage’, our product innovation sprint process, which helped us to identify two key audiences; the long-time followers known as “The Nostalgic Revisitors”, and newer fans labeled “The Discoverers”. 

More importantly however, we had to define an experience that guaranteed whatever emerging technology we used did not alienate our less tech-savvy audiences, but still ensured digital natives would be fully engaged and entertained.

The solution

We designed and built Ultimate 5, an AI-powered dream team experience that challenged fans to find the perfect team score out of a possible 18,000,000+ combinations. 

Our cluster algorithm produced scores based on combinations of eras, positions, skills and awards, to help fans discover more about the greatest players from the sport they love, whilst cementing WarnerMedia’s reputation as the NBA’s most innovative broadcast partner.

Ultimate 5 went live on NBA.com and The NBA App. Each team created was given a score and a team highlights reel which fans could share and compare to the scores of the celebrities and pundits, which generated massive levels of buzz and virality around NBA All Star Week 2022.

The results

The experience launched live on TNT’s NBA 75 Ultimate Draft show featuring legends, team owners and celebrity pundits, with glowing feedback in real-time of the game execution itself, solidifying WarnerMedia as the NBA’s premium fan innovation partner.

Over 250,000 teams were created by fans with the top 3 most picked players being Lebron James, (137,602 teams) Michael Jordan (137,178 teams) and Steph Curry (96,761). The online debate the game sparked drove even higher discovery around the history of the NBA and the best 75 players of all time.

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The details are not the details.
They make the design.

Nike asked us to increase their retail footprint in a new and interesting way. To do so, we designed an experience that allowed independent skateboard shops in LA to create their own digital storefront and populate it with a bespoke Nike inventory.

Customers could then purchase the items in-store and get them delivered within the hour. The result? A double digit sales increase, enhanced brand engagement, and a brand new, scalable hyperlocal retail solution.

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A retailer of the future

Our work opened up entirely new experiences and locations for Nike and the participating retailers. We helped a global business to innovate within the confines of a traditional retail model and think differently about how they can support their customers, as well as the end consumer.

We are now planning to scale this entire experience to other cities and other shops, while also looking at ways to enable geo-located drops for events.

All to help Nike to continually serve and support the grassroots skating scene.

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