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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Baseline!

This is your weekly blueprint for basketball culture: brand insights, marketing strategy, creator tools, and business resources.

If you find anything interesting or useful, share today’s newsletter with a friend!

MARKETING BLUEPRINT

Most athletes today post on social media without a clear strategy, resulting in stagnant follower growth.

However, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has been teaching a social media masterclass.

For the past few years, he’s been gaining a million new followers every season.

Here’s SGA’s Creator Blueprint:

Shai has mastered the art of the Instagram Carousel post.

This simple social media growth tactic was recently even endorsed by Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s CEO.

On every carousel post, Shai adds 10-20 photos and videos—giving fans all access to his life.

This means that with each new post, Shai’s content gets 10 to 20 times the reach, allowing Instagram’s algorithm to present his content to new audiences.

His carousel content includes:

🍼 Family and Newborn

👕 Fit Pics and Tunnel Arrivals

🏀 Game Highlights

😂 Memes

💰 Partnership Integration

Don’t wait, use SGA’s mixed-media carousel tactics in your content strategy to start growing your audience.

TikTok is starting to favor carousels now as well!

FREE THROWS

Sharing the tools and resources that I’m using this week:

🎞️ Instagram Trial Reels - IG introduced a new feature for select users, allowing creators to share reels with non-followers to test new ideas and gather early feedback before deciding to share a Trial Reel with their followers at any time.

🤳 Snaptik / Snapinsta - Download any TikTok or Instagram video, watermark-free, quickly and easily using these free websites.

📊 The 2024 Creative Study Report - AUFI and their research partner Early Studies asked marketers, founders, CEOs, CTOs, and brand leaders everything about creativity and compiled their answers into an in-depth creative report to recap 2024.

2025 Prediction: A Surge of Self-Serve CTV Buyers

Roku predicts that 2025 will be a breakthrough year for self-serve CTV advertising. Roku Ads Manager makes it easy to integrate CTV into your 2025 marketing mix. Easily segment your target audience, optimize campaigns in real-time, and drive conversions with interactive ad formats and shoppable ads with a Shopify integration. Roku Ads Manager makes CTV advertising accessible and impactful for businesses of any size.

Discover CTV performance on Roku

FAST BREAK

Here’s what you missed this week:

🧃 Sprite and Anthony Edwards continued their partnership by transforming Ant to Anta Claus in their new holiday campaign to promote their limited-time flavor Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry.

🐜 Jordan Brand and Travis Scott may have made the most noise at ComplexCon with their immersive experiences, pop-up shop, and concerts, but adidas Basketball and Anthony Edwards took home the weekend’s biggest award for having the AE1 named Sneaker of the Year.

🥣 Angel Reese is the first cover athlete for Reese's Puffs cereal, and their collaboration cereal is now officially on grocery store shelves across the country.

🅿️ Paige Bueckers signed an exclusive multi-year partnership with Panini, making her autographed trading cards available only on Panini College—the brand’s dedicated NIL platform.

👟 SBV compiled a complete list of every sneaker brand's NIL partnership for this high school and NCAA basketball season; including Nike, Jordan, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, and New Balance.

🏀 The NBA Creator Cup is coming back to Las Vegas, with the league’s top creators from the NBA’s Creator Correspondent Program competing on the court.

🎨 Victor Solomon collaborated with the NBA to design and provide art direction for all 31 NBA Cup courts, featuring bold and distinctive styles unique to each market's home court.

🏙️ Wemby starred in Fanatics new ad (A+ script btw), to promote the launch of the 2024-25 NBA City-Edition Jersey collection.

🍷 Domantas Sabonis and his wife, Shashana, launched their own wine brand, "Ones by Sabonis," joining Carmelo Anthony, CJ McCollum, James Harden, and Dwyane Wade as other NBA players with their own wine brands.

POST-GAME

That’s all for this week.

Hope you enjoyed reading The Baseline today.

- Jeff Chen | 🏀💡👨🏻‍💻