When it comes to mass awareness for a highly engaged audience, there are few properties that can top the power of sports marketing. The challenge, however, is that the most successful brands, from Nike to Gatorade, have a natural connection to sports. Despite this, Kia opted into a sponsorship with the NBA and a multi-season partnership with the NFL, two of sport’s most viewed properties in America.

Sports fans understand the dynamics of athlete endorsements, therefore, in order to gain a level of credibility among audiences, we decided to flip the self-serious stories of motivation into absurdly self-aware stories of endorsements by playing with each of our partner athlete’s public persona. Through culturally and contextually relevant content, we demonstrated that you don’t need to be endemic to the sport in order to have relevancy to the sports conversation.