NBA superstar Kobe Bryant’s retirement marked not just the end of a legendary sports career, but also the end of a sports marketing era.
And no brand knows how to activate around an elite endorser retirement quite like Nike, which ran a huge #MambaDay campaign around his final game.
Nike understands that tribute marketing isn’t simply about a brand saluting a departing star with adverts linked to limited edition products. Nike knows such campaigns need a theme/tone that truly matches the star’s character and they also need a mechanic for fan tributes to add supporter authenticity.
For Bryant it was ‘Love/Hate’, while Nike’s last big retirement campaign for Derek Jeter it was ‘Re2pect’
Other interesting recent brand work marking an athlete ambassador retirement include Gatorade’s Abby Wambach ‘Forget Me‘ and campaign and MasterCard’s ‘Hats Off To Tom‘ Watson tribute.
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In terms of Results, #MambaDay drove serious social media buzz both for Nike and Bryant himself as the hashtag became the fulcrum for those commenting on and capturing the final chapter of a great career.
An according to the statistics from MVP Index the hashtag generated huge impressions.
In the week 7 April to 15 April, 652 athlete and/or team entities used #MambaDay to pay tribute to Kobe on social media and posted 1,174 times generating around 1.13 billion total impressions.
Of these posts, the majority used Twitter (724 posts generating more than 109 million total impressions), followed by Instagram (289 posts by athletes and teams generating 527million total impressions) and Facebook (161 posts accounting for 488 million impressions).
28 different Nike basketball ambassadors also posted 58 times to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and generated more than 333 million total social impressions.
Nike’s top basketball ambassador Lebron James lead the way generating more than 182.6 million total impressions through his 4 #MambaDay social posts.
Top Leagues (athlete and team social accounts) posting for #MambaDay
NBA – 293 posts for 620 million impressions
La Liga – 17 posts for 170.6 million impressions
NFL – 470 posts for 86 million impressions
Men’s Tennis – 13 posts for 57 million impressions
MLB – 89 posts for 53 million impressions
Top Athletes/Teams Posting for MambaDay
LeBron James – 4 total posts for 182.6 million impressions
FC Barcelona – 11 total posts, 150.7 million impressions
Rafael Nadal – 4 total posts, 36 million impressions
Kevin Durant – 3 total posts, 35.4 million impressions
Chris Paul – 2 total posts, 32.3 million impressions
