Since day 1, basketball has been a major influence on sneaker culture, and sneaker obsession has been a hallmark of basketball culture. As a brand that strives to serve and empower the sneaker community, Foot Locker’s presence in basketball culture is critical to maintain relevance with their core consumer.

With a longstanding NBA partnership ending in 2020, the brand lost a major asset in keeping their ties to basketball culture strong. Our objective was to find a way to re-establish the Foot Locker brand in basketball culture without the resources and talent of an NBA partnership.

With the world shutdown due to COVID-19, we wanted to bring cultural access to a place where our audience could participate virtually. Our solution was to create a one-of-a kind, livestreamed event to celebrate basketball, sneakers and the culture at large.

The idea was not to replicate what the audience was missing from the NBA, but rather elevate other elements of basketball culture they typically only experienced on a small scale. So we created a custom court that would allow for virtual audience interaction with a crew of basketball culture legends ranging from Larry "Bone Collector" Williams (Streetballer) to Stephania Ergemlidze (YouTuber). This group of cultural influencers would participate in a 3-day event on the court, competing in dunks contests, games of HORSE, and 1on1. All of which could be influenced in real time by a live audience participating from the safety of their homes.

Those who love basketball culture have more of it to passively absorb today than ever before - between highlights on IG, player beef on Twitter, and viral TikTok celebrations. Simply giving our audience more of this was probably not going to suffice when it came to reconnecting the Foot Locker brand with our audience of passionate basketball enthusiasts.

While this audience may have a lot of opportunity to observe this culture, we realized they remained limited in how they could participate and become a part of it themselves. Their main form of cultural participation was typically wearing footwear that was inspired by the game and those who influence it. Given this reality, we thought the best role for the Foot Locker brand would be to bring this audience a new level of cultural access and participation beyond just the shoes on their feet.

As we sought to execute a one-of-a-kind livestreamed basketball event, it was a no-brainer to bring the experience to life on Twitch. Twitch usage was high with younger audience (68% of all users), users over-indexed on interests in apparel and sneakers, as well as having a very high virtual engagement of 27-28 minutes per visit, 4x daily.

So we partnered with artist Temi Coker to create a vibrant look and feel for the campaign, and animated Temi’s art on our court in real time using 3D projection mapping. Viewers of the livestream could use Twitch functionality to influence the artwork on the court live, get their Tweets animated live on court, cheer for and interact with the influencer talent competing in a slam dunk contest, game of HORSE, and a 1 on 1 matchup. These events unfolded over three days, each inspired by a unique theme related to basketball culture.

• 1.2MM total views

• Livestream engagement was 532% above Twitch’s benchmark

• 2,919,915 Total Min Watched

• 21,442,940 earned media impressions