While WBD’s sports portfolio also includes sublicensed ESPN college football bowl games, the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, NASCAR and the $1 billion ad revenue monster that is men’s college basketball March Madness, Steinlauf included the NBA as one of the drivers of its Venu sports streaming venture with ESPN and Fox.
“On some nights, our sports properties have reached as much as 60% of the entire linear audience, which speaks to the power of our sports portfolio,” Steinlauf told ADWEEK. “While we are working to build out our sports offerings on streaming, we have great respect for the 71 million homes still paying for television. As an audience, they are often wealthy, highly educated and sports fans.”
Time will tell if Zaslav’s company can match a rival package or if the league creates another NBA option for WBD.
A changing game
The new deals arrive at a time when the NBA is drawing more sponsorship interest than ever. According to SponsorUnited data, NBA team sponsorship revenue rose to $1.5 billion this past season. That’s up 7% from a year earlier and 77% from during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The debut of the in-season tournament alone brought in 58 brands, with 13 sponsoring the finals in Las Vegas. It drew Emirates as a sponsor for future NBA Cup installments, with the league further expanding its global reach by attracting brands to matchups in Paris, Mexico City and Abu Dhabi.
“The NBA’s global influence is arguably at its peak, with the league leveraging this prominence through innovative events and fresh opportunities for brand affiliations,” said Bob Lynch, founder and CEO of SponsorUnited.
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Meanwhile, there’s more to NBA media deals than just NBA access. All of those new deals include rights to WNBA broadcasts that were seeing increased viewership even before the arrival of Caitlin Clark and the 2024 rookie class.
Mark Zamuner, president of media agency Juice Media, noted that the fragmentation of media deals like the NBA’s ultimately creates a better, more global market for content producers and is lucrative for the league—which would increase its rights fees 2.5 times from its last deal if this estimate holds. But he also pointed out that recent growth in women’s sports highlighted even greater potential for broadcasters, advertisers and viewers.
