Bleacher Report launches new brand campaign as it begins to cover sports-culture intersection

Sports has always been about more than just the action taking place on the field, and there has recently been a dramatic shift over in how sports media is covering all of the other things fans care about.

Yesterday, Bleacher Report introduced “Up Your Game,” a new brand campaign showing that the publisher is just as focused on the culture of sports as the day-to-day.

“The young sports fan doesn’t want to sit back and watch last night’s highlights on TV,” Rory Brown, President, Bleacher Report, tells Found Remote. “Today’s sports landscape is a moments-driven business, with viewers celebrating and sharing these moments on social platforms. This shift has resulted in a decline in traditional sports viewing among young people, but the overlap of sports and culture — where sports intersects with music, fashion, pop culture and other areas — has never been stronger. This is how the young sports fan talks about sports, and this is how B/R makes moments — by focusing on sports and culture vs. just the box score or the highlights.”

The launch is accompanied by a video spot that will be distributed across TV and digital properties, and features a cameo by NBA great Allen Iverson, an athlete who helped usher in the modern-day sports-culture crossover era.

The campaign coincides with the launch of a redesigned Bleacher Report app (formerly Team Stream) featuring a new navigation experience at the top of the app that allows fans to quickly toggle between categories. The app also features “Fire Stream,” which surfaces the latest viral sports videos. In addition to the real-time delivery of content, the app makes it easier than ever before for fans to share the experience with others across social platforms.

Bleacher Report recognizes that the concept of publishers as destinations is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and with the updated app and a broader off-site strategy, B/R is engaging the modern sports fan wherever they are consuming content.

“You have to be where the audience is, and you have to stand out,” says Brown. “B/R has incredibly talented people with the creative insights to know what type of content is going to resonate on what platform. Building audience no longer means drawing people to your homepage. B/R builds its audience – an audience that is increasingly loyal to our brand – by creating experiences specifically built for our app, experiences built for Snapchat, experiences built for Instagram, etc. Because of this, we’re in a unique spot. We have people waking up and intentionally engaging with our brand through our app, and we also have people finding, engaging with and sharing the experiences we’re creating on other platforms. We’re a brand that’s always in sight in mind for a growing number of people.”