Yahoo's brand mission is to give fans more of what they love. For Yahoo Sports, that means giving fans a lot more information about their teams, their favorite players, and their favorite sports in general. But when it comes to the 75th Anniversary of the NBA, it's really hard for any sports platform to offer "more". It's such a big moment for the league that every publishing brand covers all about it - becoming more of the same and leaving fans asking for more.

Yahoo Sports approached us to help them find a way to make the brand stand out in that very competitive environment. "How can we do something that basketball fans will love, without repeating the same stories they are already tired to hear about?"

All we knew was that we had a space at the All-Star weekend and $300K for production.

When all sports platforms were covering the success stories and the epic achievements of the greatest players of all time, we decided to look to the opposite side. In partnership with Yahoo's editorial team, we created a brand experience to show untold stories of the GOATs: where and how did the world's best players start?

The First Bounce was an immersive experience during the All-Start Weekend where fans could step inside the world's best players' shoes and get back in the past, to the very places where those players got their start: the most iconic street courts in America.

The time-capsule of streetball not only brought fans back in time but also showed them the impact that each one of those courts had in multiple spheres of culture: from music, to fashion.

Our target audience is one of the most challenging ones to please: rabid basketball fans and influencers of the sports world, who know everything about the sport, top to bottom. We needed something that could make them feel that Yahoo Sports has actually relevant content that they can't find anywhere else.

The creative idea, research, and content development were all done by us, with the support of Yahoo's editorial team to make the stories authentic and extremely relevant even to the most extreme basketball fans. The production of the 3D courts and screen content were done in partnership with a studio.

Our biggest challenge was the timeline. Yahoo approached us to start working on this project in late November, when the idea needed to go live on February 20th.

All the ideation process, research, talent management, 3D development of the street courts, business affairs, era-inspired music playlists, photography, vintage basketball cards, and all the content were created during that very tight time frame.

In order to pull that off, we created a fully integrated team that met twice a week over the entire period of the campaign.

Over 6,400 people visited the exhibition during the All-Star weekend and the response from fans was pretty remarkable. Not only fans came to visit the space, but also famous players themselves came to celebrate some of the courts that had a huge importance in their careers, like Rucker Park in NY, Venice Beach in LA and others, sharing the experience on their own social channels with a massive following of basketball fans.

Over 80% of fans stayed inside the immersion with the brand for over 10 minutes (total time of the experience), representing an average time of over 7 minutes spent with Yahoo Sports. Over 80% of the fans who participated interacted with the content and listened to the era-inspired playlists created by Hip-Hop artist DJ Bobitto, representing each one of the courts.