The Basketball Bundesliga, known to fans as the BBL, is the highest level of professional basketball in Germany, and made up of 17 teams including EuroLeague name stays Bayern Munich and Alba Berlin. Following a surge in international success and interest around German basketball, the BBL’s content team made the strategic decision to turn up their content production. They started using WSC Sports’ AI platform to massively scale the amount of videos created and shared to social media, and encouraged teams to do the same in a joint effort to amplify noise around the league. These are just a few examples of what they achieved in the first year.
Our target audience is mainly young men, and they’re not only watching on TV, but also on YouTube, Instagram, and other social platforms. WSC Sports helps us get the content in front of them precisely when and where they want to consume it.”
easyCredit BBL
PIVOTING THE CONTENT STRATEGY
Recognizing the trend of fans consuming more highlights and recaps on social media, BBL decided to increase the breadth of content they produce. Going into the 2023-24 season, the content team set a goal to create and publish at least 2,000 videos to their YouTube and Instagram accounts. In the first year they more than doubled that benchmark. To create a variety of storylines on any given night, BBL’s content team saw value in creating different types of videos, not just traditional highlights. They set up 22 automation rules to capture everything from the most exciting plays, to full-game recaps, footage from the off-season, and more. Every video is then saved, stored and ready to be shared immediately, or at a later time. These new storytelling capabilities allowed the team to put their content in front of more basketball fans, and raise the awareness of the Basketball Bundesliga all over the world.
Compared to the previous season, views and subscribers are up 32% and 17% respectively on YouTube and the growth is nearly identical on Instagram. Most importantly, the total number of organic views on social media has now surpassed what they used to achieve with paid, sponsored ads—a huge savings for the team in terms of budget and time invested into creating quality content.
