NBA team the Atlanta Hawks bet on creators to boost advertiser appeal

Professional basketball team the Atlanta Hawks have launched the NBA’s first formalized creator collective.

The Atlanta Hawks Creator Collective is a group of 25 content creators that the NBA team has granted special access to home games and events such as training facility tours. The team soft-launched the program last year, with Atlanta-based creators including Dayna Bolden and Roxanne Kaiser attending — and posting about — Hawks events throughout the 2024-2025 basketball season.

The collective spans across both platforms and genres, and includes non-sports creators such as Kaiser and Julio Angel Muñoz. Members of the collective are paid a fee to create content about the games they attend, in addition to a mixture of other paid and unpaid opportunities. The past year represented a beta test of sorts for the program. Pleased with its performance, Hawks executives plan to officially announce the collective tomorrow, at Atlanta’s State of Creators of Color summit.

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Ad execs are now working as Trump tariff policy translators for advertisers

The Monday after President Trump’s tariffs rattled global markets and raised the specter of a recession, global agency group Dept did what few in advertising are built to do: it pivoted to policy. The shop stood up a 10-person team of strategists — not to pitch an idea but to translate Trump’s policies on tariffs into something a marketer could act on.

And not a moment too soon. Unlike past macroeconomic crises, this one put marketers at the center. The ripple effects hit every part of their remit: media budgets, pricing models, procurement timelines. The usual buffers between policy and marketing disappeared overnight. 

So Dept adapted. Less about campaigns, more about contingency. A team of Trump policy interpreters helping clients contort their way through the chaos. They’re working along two tracks: with marketers based in the U.S. and with those outside it looking to sell into the country — each facing a different set of questions and a shared sense of uncertainty.

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