Scouting America drops recruitment campaign starring Josh Hart

Before New York Knicks guard Josh Hart was an NBA champion, he was an Eagle Scout.

In an homage to those roots, Hart’s latest brand partnership is with Scouting America, the nonprofit organization formerly known as Boy Scouts of America. The deal was announced last month, but the first Scouting America campaign video dropped today, CMO Michael Ramsey shared exclusively with Marketing Brew.

The campaign marks a deeper push into sports for Scouting America, which has in recent years shifted its marketing strategy and target audience after finding an unexpected level of success partnering with NFL running back David Montgomery, Ramsey said. The work with both athletes has also pushed the organization further into digital marketing, as opposed to relying primarily on recruiting via flyers in backpacks, he added.

“The big shift for us is a digital strategy led by David, led by Josh, [and] led by influencer content that gets mom and dad, reaches them where they are,” Ramsey told Marketing Brew.

Cross my Hart

The campaign starring Hart centers around a 30-second video called “The Comeback,” which shows Hart training in the gym before sinking a 3-pointer on the court. It’s set to run first on Instagram as a collaborative post between Hart and Scouting America, then as part of a paid push on Meta platforms, TikTok, YouTube, Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, and Amazon Prime Video.

“Scouting taught me that adversity isn’t game over,” Hart says in a voiceover. “It’s a test of character, and character always wins.”

The video ends with Hart giving the Scout sign. That move, as well as Scouting America’s embrace of social platforms, was in part inspired by the organization’s work with Montgomery, Ramsey said. Once, after the running back first started appearing in recruitment content for Scouting America in 2024, he celebrated a touchdown by flashing the sign—which Ramsey told us was entirely organic.

The move “generated a lot of conversation” online among people who weren’t familiar with the gesture, and led to a big increase in followers for Scouting America, especially men, Ramsey said. After that, the organization tweaked its targeting to focus more on dads by working with platforms like ESPN, he said.

“What we figured out is that the dad is probably the one that had the brand experience, who was the one who was a Scout as a kid,” Ramsey told us. “They’re the ones that smelled the wood smoke.”

TroopTok

The new campaign was designed to recruit more scouts, Ramsey said, so one of his primary KPIs is traffic to the organization’s sign-up page. Scouting America has seen double-digit increases in traffic to the site for the past three years, he said, which he attributes to the campaigns with Montgomery in 2024 and 2025, as well as a recent pivot to social and digital.

“Internally, culturally, several years ago, there was a little bit of concern about, ‘Wow, the Scouts are advertising on TikTok,’” Ramsey said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah. That’s where our audiences are today, and so that’s where we’re seeing huge levels of positive engagement.’”

The Hart campaign is primarily focused on Instagram and TikTok, Ramsey said, and Scouting America has also supplemented its athlete content with influencer partnerships. Its athlete and influencer partners alike all have personal scouting experience, he added.

Scouting report

Hart is set to work with Scouting America through the end of next year, according to Ramsey, and Montgomery is signed on with the brand through at least 2026. Ramsey said his team is having conversations about potential future sports partnerships, but is focused for now on the upcoming start of the NBA season, which lines up with the end of peak scout recruitment season in October.

The hope is that Hart can bring the same kind of virality to Scouting America that Montgomery did.

“We’re not saying he’s going to throw a [Scout] sign at some point, but maybe,” Ramsey said. “That’d be great.”