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Welcome to a Christmas Eve edition of The Baseline, where we’re recapping the 2025 marketing and creator strategies we saw across basketball culture.

Let’s jump right into it…

MARKETING BLUEPRINT

When you zoom out over the past 12 months, the same creative strategies kept showing up across basketball culture in 2025.

Today’s newsletter breaks down the creator and marketing trends we’ve been tracking all year:

📧 Expanding Audience Platforms - Athletes are no longer relying solely on Instagram. Superstar athletes like Stephen Curry and Russell Westbrook have launched their own newsletters to connect directly with their audience, and Anthony Edwards has been sharing exclusive content on YouTube to diversify his audience platforms.

📹 The Rise of Streamers - The streaming era has only just begun as we’ve seen a seismic shift in streamers who can create live content, hype and community. Brands like adidas Basketball are pairing creators to their signature athletes and teams like the Atlanta Hawks are creating 24-hour live stream marathons.

🙋‍♂️ Building in Public - Everyone should be a creator today in some capacity (written, video—pick your format!) but the individuals who openly document their journey are growing faster and creating more opportunites for themselves and their brands. Just look at Corporate Hooper and HoopFuel, NBA skills trainer Chris Brickley and even Klutch’s CEO Rich Paul.

🐘 Character World Building - Teams like the New York Liberty are creating larger-than-life characters and mascots that are transformed into standalone intellectual property by building personalities, lore, and content worlds that audiences can follow.

🎓 NIL 2.0 - The next chapter in NIL saw brands introduce NIL Classes, and emerging athletes began building their own brands, like 6 7 Water, to capitalize on the popularity of their own name, image, and likeness.

🤳 Athlete Multi-Platform Strategy - This next generation of athletes, like BYU’s AJ Dybantsa and UConn’s Azzi Fudd, have built ecosystems where each social media platform serves a different role instead of reposting the same content everywhere.

😂 Memes and Parody Accounts - Being funny is the fastest way for teams and brands to move at internet speed, driving shares, relatability, and native platform growth. Just look at how the Atlanta Hawks have become one of the NBA’s largest TikTok accounts with their meme strategy and how NBA Centel became the biggest topic in sports business for an entire week.

🥩 Social Media Beef - Public brand beefs proved that conflict, when done strategically, can generate digital awareness and cultural conversation (i.e. Chime vs Jordan Brand and adidas Basketball vs Converse Hoops).

🎟️ Niche Membership Clubs - Exclusive, niche-membership clubs emerged as a way for brands like Kith, The Program and Boardroom to monetize trust and community instead of chasing the masses.

✍️ SLOGO - Copywriting is cool again (Slogan + Tagline = SLOGO) and media companies like Front Office Sports built a short, repeatable idea into their brand identity that makes their messaging easier to remember and scale.

📲 Activation as Content - Startups like Novig are using their activations as viral content opportunities, designing every detail of their stunts to become a user-generated content moment. The most efficient campaigns transform fans into a UGC engine, achieving scale without massive production budgets.

🏀 Hoops Creator Programs - Brands are developing internal creator programs to serve as their distribution engines, creating content that reaches new audiences and builds a deeper connection with their existing communities. The Atlanta Hawks were the NBA’s first team to implement such a program, and Mizzou Men’s Basketball has also established one for their Pro Day. 

If your brand needs help building a creator program that actually drives the business forward, reply “CREATORS” and I’ll share how I built and scaled a creator system for Gordon Hayward’s startup FORM Basketball.

Shoppers are adding to cart for the holidays

Over the next year, Roku predicts that 100% of the streaming audience will see ads. For growth marketers in 2026, CTV will remain an important “safe space” as AI creates widespread disruption in the search and social channels. Plus, easier access to self-serve CTV ad buying tools and targeting options will lead to a surge in locally-targeted streaming campaigns.

Read our guide to find out why growth marketers should make sure CTV is part of their 2026 media mix.

Learn more.

FREE THROWS

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

📧 Link In Bio Newsletter - An essential read for insightful breakdowns and strategies for anyone interested in social media marketing.

🎧 Answer The Public - Discover what people are searching for on the internet to help your brand gain consumer insights, from Google to ChatGPT.

🧠 Wealth and Happiness - This is a long but great Podcast watch for your holiday break on a unique perspective on wealth and happiness from Naval Ravikant (co-founder and chairman of AngelList and also early investor at Twitter, Uber, Notion, and many other successful companies).nd Wish.

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POST-GAME

Thanks for reading—I’ll see you back here later this week!

And if you enjoyed reading today’s newsletter, please share it with one friend.

- Jeff Chen | 🏀💡👨🏻‍💻