The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2022
Brooklyn Nets mark a decade in Brooklyn by letting kids narrate the anniversary film
For the Nets' 10 years in Brooklyn, Wieden+Kennedy passed the mic to the borough's children instead of making another hype reel.
Brooklyn Nets
What it had to solve
The Brooklyn Nets were approaching ten years since moving to Brooklyn. Wieden+Kennedy was asked to make an anthem for the anniversary; the expected answer was a hype reel of the decade's best plays and moments.
How it works
In 2022 the Brooklyn Nets were marking ten years since moving to Brooklyn. Wieden+Kennedy had the opportunity to create an anthem for the anniversary, and the default playbook was a hype reel — highlights, stars and noise.
The agency instead celebrated the Brooklyn way by passing the mic to the community. The campaign combined unscripted interviews with the Nets' first 'lifelong' fans — children who had grown up in Brooklyn during the same decade — with visuals shot as a love letter to the borough. The kids talk about the highs, lows and beauty of growing up there, and the parallels to the Nets' own journey are drawn by their words rather than by an announcer.
The result was a film that argued the team does not merely sit in Brooklyn but belongs to it. It became the centerpiece of the 10-year celebration, was written up by Sports Business Journal in its 'Nets at 10' retrospective, and was recorded in the D&AD 2023 Annual.
Why it lands
- The anniversary brief was inverted: instead of the team celebrating itself to its fans, the team let its fans celebrate it to the world.
- Children who were born around the move are the only generation that has known the Nets only as Brooklyn's, making them the most credible narrators of the decade.
- Unscripted, unpolished testimony reads as truth where a produced hype reel would read as marketing.
- Shooting Brooklyn as the subject rather than the backdrop aligned the team's story with borough pride, so local audiences saw themselves in the film.
What it did
The two-minute film became the team's anniversary centerpiece, framing the Nets as a team that belongs to Brooklyn rather than one merely located there. It was covered by Sports Business Journal as the centerpiece of the franchise's 10-year retrospective and was recorded in the D&AD 2023 Annual.
What you can take
An anniversary brief is a chance to say who the brand belongs to: letting the community's own voices tell it made a franchise's decade legible as a borough's story, not a trophy reel.
Since then
The film ran through the Nets' 10th-anniversary season as the team's anthem and was logged in D&AD's 2023 Annual. More broadly, it became a reference for anniversary storytelling in sports: a franchise choosing the voice of its city over its own highlights.
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