Warner Bros. Discovery is embracing youth to hype the Basketball World Cup

Soccer wasn’t the only sport with a World Cup this summer.

The US Women’s National Basketball Team is currently overseas in Berlin, competing for its fifth consecutive gold medal at the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. And with the WNBA season on break to accommodate, basketball fans stateside can watch the tournament on Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) platforms, including TNT, TBS, and HBO Max.

Though this is WBD’s first year holding FIBA rights, women’s basketball properties like Unrivaled and college hoops are a key focus of the media company’s sports rights portfolio, according to Stefanie Rapp, SVP of sports strategy for WBD Ad Sales.

With a roster that includes international starpower and women’s sports fandom growing around the world, it only made sense for WBD to invest in the Women’s Basketball World Cup, Rapp said, which also means coming up with some promotion plans to encourage tune-in.

“Usually, we put more of a cookie-cutter promotion plan in place,” she told Marketing Brew. “We’re not doing that with this, and I think a big reason is because we want to make sure we get behind the scenes, and make sure the personalities of the players are front and center.”

Young and talented

This year’s Team USA roster skews younger. Paige Bueckers, Angel Reese, and Caitlin Clark are all making their debuts on the senior national team, and with A’ja Wilson and Kelsey Plum out due to health reasons, Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen, both of whom are in their sophomore seasons in the W, are playing on the team as injury replacements.

That being said, many of the debut players are already household names, which is why the WBD team is centering its content for the tournament largely on the athletes, Rapp told us. Last week, ahead of Team USA’s first game on Friday, the WBD content team started posting tune-in messaging across its accounts, including Bleacher Report, House of Highlights, and B/R W, the Bleacher Report women’s sports page.

From the jump, the content highlighted many of the players’ eccentric personalities (the younger cohort refers to themselves as the “Young and Turnt Crew”), from Bueckers twerking on a wall, to player superlatives, impressions, and clapbacks. Now, with the tournament in full swing, the social content contains a mix of player personality videos and on-court highlights “across all distribution points,” Rapp said.

In addition to social posts and coverage of all 36 games, two Team USA games were co-streamed on YouTube—a first for WBD, which Rapp told us was designed to reach younger fans.

“There’s this big misconception that the younger generation has no attention span,” she said. “They’re not watching live TV, which is true, however, they are consuming live games if you distribute them on the platforms where they already are.”

Brand ball

The current Team USA athletes don’t only help bring viewers to the World Cup; they also play a role in attracting advertisers. Sponsors of WBD’s coverage of the tournament include halftime presenting partner Arkay Spirits, AT&T, Tissot, Turkish Airlines, DraftKings, and Google.

Some of those brands are also sponsoring assets outside of the game, Rapp said. Arkay Spirits, for instance, is sponsoring game recaps on the WBD-owned House of Highlights YouTube channel in addition to its in-broadcast signage.

Though the FIBA tournament doesn’t have the same profile in the US as other international sporting events, the names of the Team USA players carry enough weight to at least help kickstart the ad sales process, Rapp said.

“You talk about the players, and it just speaks volumes,” she said. “These have become, crazy enough, real household names at this point. For some of them, it’s the first time they’re on our platform…For others, like Paige [Bueckers] with Unrivaled, we know that when Paige has a role on our platform, we see spikes in audience, so you start putting the puzzle together, if you will, for these advertisers.”