NBA team the Atlanta Hawks bet on creators to boost advertiser appeal

The collective spans across both platforms and genres, and includes non-sports creators such as Kaiser and Julio Angel Muñoz. Members of the collective are paid a fee to create content about the games they attend, in addition to a mixture of other paid and unpaid opportunities. The past year represented a beta test of sorts for the program. Pleased with its performance, Hawks executives plan to officially announce the collective tomorrow, at Atlanta’s State of Creators of Color summit.

“In some cases, they do get an honorarium or a fee to do certain things, and in other cases they do it because we’re a team,” said Hawks vp of entertainment industry relations Levetta Futrell. “For example, when they came to [dinner event] Taste of the Hawks, there was no money exchange; they came as guests and as part of the quote-unquote ‘team.’ They captured content and they posted on their own.”

Sponsorship opportunities

The Atlanta Hawks intend for the Creator Collective to eventually act as a source of sponsorship inventory for the team, although it has not yet signed any specific partnerships tied to the collective. However, Hawks executives said they are pleased with the results of the initiative so far, which is why the team is leaning into the collective with this week’s official announcement.

The combined reach of the Atlanta Hawks Creator Collective is 14.9 million followers, according to Hawks svp of marketing Narcis Alikhani, who did not break the number down between specific platforms. Over the past season, members of the collective published 68 videos about their experiences at Hawks games, generating 1.7 million impressions and $113,000 in earned media value, per Alikhani, who cited numbers from Sprout Social. At the moment, the Hawks team does not share a cut of sponsorship revenue with collective members, but Alikhani said the team was “open to exploring” a revenue share structure as the program grows.

“That is the plan, essentially — to create a platform for sponsors to be able to be involved,” Alikhani said.

With advertisers wary of a coming recession, ad spend is projected to slow down across the board in 2025. Although the Atlanta Hawks boast millions of followers across the team’s social accounts and include brands such as Kia and Coca-Cola among its sponsors, launching a creator collective creates more opportunities for the team to glean an even greater share of brands’ media budgets, in addition to their sponsorship spend.

“Sponsorship spend has slower deal cycles; it takes brands a lot longer to make decisions, and their partnerships are longer-lasting,” said Malph Minns, managing director of sports marketing agency Strive Sponsorship. “Media deals are more buying eyeballs — their spend is more frequent and faster, but the tenure of those agreements is often shorter, because they’re essentially buying exposure. What creators offer you is potentially an opportunity to go to media agencies and media buyers and start to sell to them, where, previously, you hadn’t had anything to sell to them.”

Creator benefits

Participating creators view the Hawks Creator Collective as both an opportunity to make some extra cash and a chance to create videos that resonate with their fans. The 25 members of the Creator Collective are all mid-sized creators, with followings that range between the thousands and the hundreds of thousands. No individual member has more than a million followers.

The first class of the Creator Collective was recruited directly by Hawks manager of entertainment industry relations Chris Thorkilsen, but creators interested in participating next season can apply through an official NBA web page that opened last week. Brands are a key part of the value proposition for creators, with the page listing “brand partnership opportunities” among the benefits for interested creators.

Thus far, however, the opportunities for brands to actually engage with individual collective members are relatively limited. Aside from attending “suite nights” with executives from sponsors such as BMW — an opportunity offered to both Creator Collective members and other influencers — members of the collective said that it has not yet helped them gain new brand partnership opportunities.

Bringing in more brands and advertisers is a clear goal of the collective, but for now, that part of the program appears to still be a work in progress.

“I’m not going to lie, this is the first time I’ve heard the details of that. I think it is just so new that they haven’t been saying much about it,” Kaiser, the Creator Collective member, said regarding the brand partnership opportunity. “I’ve heard little rumblings about what they’re trying to make it into — which is awesome, because it’s an incentive for us.”

A formalized approach

Media buyers and agency executives are excited by the prospect of an official creator collective backed by an NBA team, although some pointed out that the Hawks Creator Collective is simply a more official version of the collaborations that have taken place between NBA teams and prominent influencers for years. The NBA itself also launched an expanded creator program in late 2024, with plans to leverage that program as sponsorship inventory in its own right in the near future.

What makes the Atlanta Hawks Creator Collective unique is its formalized nature. Rather than recruiting creators to attend one-off suite nights or create content for specific campaigns or activations, the Hawks are raising the profile of a discrete group of creators — and tying those creators directly to the team’s brand, with the explicit goal of generating brand sponsorship opportunities.

“I do think what they’re trying to do with actually monetizing it with their sponsorships is innovative, and I have not seen that done before in the sports space,” said Gabe Gordon, CEO of influencer marketing company Reach Agency.

As the Atlanta Hawks recruits more creators to the collective, the team’s ability to successfully sell advertisers on the media opportunity could determine whether more sports teams dip their toes into the creator space in a more formalized way.

“I can almost guarantee that a lot of other teams, not just in basketball, but across leagues, are going to keep their eye on that to see if it is an actual, sellable piece of inventory,” said Ryan Dow, a vp at sports marketing agency Sportfive.