CeraVe’s Kevin Durant campaign led to a 43% sales lift—here’s how

Kevin Durant is an NBA champion, an MVP, and a gold medalist. Perhaps more importantly, he’s also the face of legs.

Earlier this year, skin care brand CeraVe declared Kevin Durant to be the “new face of legs” in a campaign that riffed on a 2021 viral post from former NBA player Isaiah Thomas about Durant’s long (and apparently dry) limbs. Durant kicked off the campaign with a video responding to the post and its replies on X, a platform where he’s long been active and has developed a reputation for clapping back.

“‘Next time you take a matter into your own hands, make sure it’s lotion,’” Durant reads in the video. “That’s actually pretty funny. I don’t have a reply to that.”

The three-week campaign featured a hero video with a drawn-out pan of Durant’s legs and could be seen across TV placements, OOH, and point-of-sale promotions; however, the primary focus was on social, Esther Garcia, GM at CeraVe US, told us.

The “New Face of Legs” campaign led to a 43% sales lift for CeraVe, in addition to more than 4.1 billion PR impressions and 83 million organic video views, the brand exclusively told Marketing Brew. At Cannes Lions this week, CeraVe will be celebrating the success of the campaign with Durant at Stagwell’s Sport Beach, co-hosted by Durant’s media company, Boardroom.

We spoke to Garcia and James Rowe, president of the branded entertainment and content studio Bolded at OBB, about how the campaign came together and how it fits into CeraVe’s broader strategy of using comedy and native-seeming content to drive big results.

Dry humor

Rowe told us that the company had been working with Durant on a documentary and was inspired by the “ashy ankles incident” to pitch CeraVe, which just so happens to be the official skin care partner of the NBA.

“The brief wrote itself,” Rowe said. “We started with this idea of, ‘What if CeraVe didn’t sponsor KD, but really just sponsored KD’s legs?”

Garcia said the brand had been underindexing among men, and the campaign opened up an opportunity to encourage men, and particularly men of color, to use skin care. The pitch was approved in December, shot in January, and was released into the world in February, Rowe said.

To break through on social, Rowe said the campaign needed to be entertaining and feel natural to Durant. “Knowing Kevin’s audience and his sway on [X], it was really important to live there, because that was going to be authentic to Kevin,” he said.

Outside of X, Durant was tasked with bread-crumbing the campaign, including through “paparazzi-style” photos on Instagram where CeraVe moisturizing cream is visible in his gym bag, Rowe said. It’s a strategy that may sound familiar to anyone who remembers CeraVe’s 2024 Super Bowl campaign with Michael Cera, in which the actor was photographed holding bags containing the brand’s products in the weeks leading up to the Big Game.

“It’s part of the playbook we have,” Garcia said. “People lean in, engage, become part of the conversation, then have that unexpected twist in a way.”

Rowe said the informal metric guiding the campaign was whether someone would share posts about it in a group chat. The first tweet from Durant, he said, became a top-10 post in the US right out the gate based on organic engagement. But Durant didn’t do it alone; CeraVe also worked with medical influencers to further broaden the reach of the campaign online.

The sales lift from the campaign to date has impressed the team, Rowe said. “To create any sort of double-digit sales lift is tough to do; 43% is almost unheard of.”

Garcia said CeraVe is continuing to track growing sales since the campaign. The plan is to continue the partnership with the NBA long-term and continue to tap into new ways of reaching men, as evidenced by the brand’s recent partnership with NBA legend Carmelo Anthony promoting its anti-dandruff hair products.

At the end of the day, Rowe said Durant’s campaign boiled down to being an effective and entertaining product demo.

“It’s really the most incredible before and after we could offer,” he said.