In 2018, the Golden State Warriors continued their meteoric rise as they made their fourth consecutive run in the Western Conference Finals of the NBA playoffs. Fans waited in anticipation to watch their team take on their longtime rivals. As the official beer of the NBA, Budweiser set out to participate in one of the biggest media buys of the season. While most NBA sponsors would look to celebrate the players, Budweiser identified a unique opportunity when we discovered that the first game of the series fell on Mother’s Day. The brief was to take a different approach to our sponsorship with the league and create a piece of content that would shine a light on the moms behind the league’s biggest players. We wanted to help show the world that without mom, these stars wouldn’t be the champions they are today.

Our idea was to show how motherly advice takes on a whole new meaning on the basketball court. We were inspired by NBA superstar Kevin Durant’s acceptance speech for the Most Valuable Player award he won. During his speech he famously celebrated his mother for everything she’d done to help him in his career and emotionally told her that she was the real MVP. The phrase immediately went viral in basketball culture. Our film starts with his speech and then we move through examples of classic motherly advice juxtaposed against footage of NBA players following it on the court. The film starred some of the biggest NBA moms in the league, who are stars in their own right. For the voiceover we partnered with the real MVP herself, Wanda Durant, to add even more power to our message.

Budweiser celebrates the people and stories that inspire the world. Stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. In the world of basketball, our most important sports sponsorship, we realized that moms don’t get the credit they deserve for helping their sons reach the highest levels of success. Budweiser set out to help shine a larger light on these unsung heroes. By focusing on a human truth that anyone can relate to we aimed to make a different type of statement during one of the NBA’s biggest games. We also worked closely with the league to pull in footage from the playoffs as the games ended in real time. We got fans to celebrate Mother’s Day with Budweiser by connecting with people on a level bigger than sports.

Budweiser’s film launched on television during the national broadcast of the first game of the NBA Western Conference Finals. The game fell on Sunday May 13th, which was Mother’s Day. But to add even more relevance and significance, Kevin Durant was on the starting lineup of one of the teams playing that day, the Golden State Warriors. Since the NBA has a massive Twitter audience — literally dubbed “NBA Twitter” — we knew launching the film on social media and building an influencer plan around this culture would provide additional scale and shareability. To drive even further scale, Budweiser partnered with NBA moms, including Wanda Durant, and players, like Iman Shumpert, Tobias Harris, Lou Williams, and Isaiah Thomas, to share the video on their own channels.

Budweiser’s video drove 81MM+ impressions, over 9MM video views, and more than 25K social conversations. The campaign was covered in major news outlets, as well as publications within the world of sports, culture and advertising, including USA Today, AdAge, HypeBeast, SB Nation, and The Score. Advertising insiders like Tim Nudd and Jeff Eisenband also shared the video with their own online communities. Ultimately, beyond views and impressions, Budweiser was able to use the power of sport to show the impact moms have in all of our lives.