How WBD Leveraged the NBA to Drive Record Revenue for Hockey

For the NBA and NHL, most sponsors chose to activate during the playoffs and the Stanley Cup.

“We also did more business in the upfront last summer or spring, and we wrote more business just because sports is more prevalent in the media landscape, so people were spending more money in sports,” said Diament.

WBD headed into the postseason with a “much bigger base” than it traditionally had in the past, with Diament also citing the strength of the teams that went to the playoffs as a positive factor.

One for the record books

For its first year with the Stanley Cup finals, WBD is seeing 95% of its NHL advertisers increasing spend or being new to the schedule, a number the company is “pretty proud of.”

“We’ve broken our revenue records. We’re way above where we were the year before,” said Diament.

The question then becomes how much inventory will be available based on how many games there are. Should there be a sweep in the finals, the liability will return to the market. So while WBD is not sold out, it has achieved its sales goals.

“We anticipated a lot of Game 6s, Game 7s, and when there are no sweeps that means more games. More games means more units, and more units means we’re not sold out just yet,” said Diament.

The company saw a lot of seasonal advertisers enter the market in the second quarter, including beverages, restaurants and travel.

“We see a lot of nontraditional sports advertisers buying sports for the first time and clients loving the demos and loving the fact that it’s live and engaging,” said Diament. “So we anticipate the upfront to have more sports purchased earlier, just because of those trends.”