Are You Giving Back to Culture, or Just Taking From It?
Sports brands run on culture. Most of us haven’t earned the right to.
Every brand in sports wants to be “in the culture.” It shows up in the briefs I read, the pitch decks I receive, and the campaign recaps that lead with words like authentic and community.
But there’s a question I’ve started asking myself and my team before we greenlight anything that borrows from a community, a sound, a style, or a neighborhood:
What Does This Culture Get Back From Us?
If the honest answer is “exposure,” we’re not participating in culture. We’re extracting from it.
The difference between borrowing and building
Taking from culture looks like this: a campaign drops on a heritage month, pulls the aesthetic, the slang, the music, and the faces, runs for four weeks, and disappears. The community gets a hashtag. The brand gets engagement. The exchange is entirely one-directional.
Giving back looks different, and it’s slower:
You pay the people who made the culture, not just the people who look like it. The photographer from the neighborhood, the local artist, the DJ who’s been doing the party for a decade. Not a lookalike from an agency roster.
You show up when there’s no campaign. Culture notices who’s in the room in the off-season.
You build things that outlast the content. A clinic, a scholarship, a training program, a permanent partnership. Something that still exists after the flight ends.
You let the community shape the work, not just appear in it. Co-creation means giving up some creative control. That’s uncomfortable for creative directors. It’s also the point.
Why This Matters More In Sports Then Anywhere Else?
Sports is culture. The game, the music in the arena, the sneakers, the celebrations, the neighborhoods that produce the players — none of it belongs to the league or the team. It belongs to the people who built it, most of whom will never see a courtside seat.
That puts a specific responsibility on those of us who market the game. We are the ones deciding whose stories get told, who gets paid to tell them, and whether the relationship with a community is a transaction or a commitment.
Fans can tell the difference. Not always immediately, but always eventually.
What I’ve Learned From Doing It Imperfectly
I run a foundation alongside my day job, and I started it because I got tired of watching brands celebrate girls in basketball for one month a year while doing nothing to put a ball in a girl’s hands the other eleven. Our clinics and scholarship fund aren’t marketing. However, they’ve made me a better marketer, because they forced me to sit inside a community long enough to understand what it actually needs, versus what looks good in a recap video.
That’s the shift: from what can we say about this community to what can we build with it.
Three questions for your next brief
1. Who from this culture is being paid, credited, and given creative input on this work?
2. What will still exist in this community twelve months after the campaign ends?
3. If we never posted a single piece of content about this, would we still do it?
If you can’t answer the third one with a yes, you already know what kind of brand you’re being.
This is the second piece in a series on marketing, brand, and the business of sports. Last week: why creative is a line item, not a cost center. Next: experiential marketing, and why the game itself is the least important part.
// A Nine28 Publication