The most important person in the NBA you've never heard of sat in an exclusive, secluded area inside the Charlotte Marriott on the Friday of All-Star weekend, taking meetings to enhance the league's positions in what could be its most important market.
NBA China CEO Derek Chang had quite the busy itinerary, with at least a few hundred Chinese business partners and their guests in attendance for one of the league's biggest annual weekends.
There was a meeting the day before with Nike, but the NBA has what it calls 25 marketing partners in China like the Mengniu dairy company, travel company Ctrip and shoe brand Anta that are vitally important in the enormous Chinese landscape.
Among the nearly 1.4 billion people who call China home, 640 million of them watched some kind of NBA programming over the course of the 2017-2018 season, per league figures. That's nearly twice the population of the entire United States.
"When global partners are looking at the NBA, I think for them the two big markets are really the U.S. and China," Chang said. "And in some respects for some of these guys, they start to look at China as almost a bigger opportunity going forward.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Chang discussed the staggering growth opportunities the NBA has in China and the strategies the league is undertaking to make basketball the most popular sport in the world's largest nation.
The first strategy is an obvious one: Television viewership. Though the NBA Finals wasn't really close last year, CCTV drew 25 million viewers per game, per league figures. For Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals between Golden State and Houston, 29.4 million tuned in on CCTV and another 10 million watched on Tencent. Chang estimates that regular season games this season average four million viewers on CCTV and three million on Tencent even though an 8 p.m. game in New York tips off at 9 a.m. the next day in China.
The scope and scale of the NBA's shoulder content in China is also huge. The league estimates that it has 180 million social media followers in China, and its flagship weekly show NBA Primetime has averaged 28 million viewers per episode over the last three years.
Chinese outlets which covered All-Star weekend on-site in Charlotte included CCTV, Tencent, Weibo, ByteDance, Douyin, Guangdong TV, Best TV, VideoLand, TitanSports and Hoop Magazine. And because major American technology players like Google, Amazon and Facebook have little to no foothold in China, the NBA needs to pay special attention and devote separate and unique strategies to these Chinese companies.
“So Tencent and Youku and Baidu and social media sites like Weibo or Douyin, these guys sort of have their own ecosystem that’s grown up around the NBA,” Chang said. “And what they’re doing with the content is different than what you might do here.”
The NBA recently made a media deal with ByteDance, the parent company of Douyin, which in Chang’s words is the Chinese equivalent of the youth-focused American viral video site TikTok. One 10-second video where Detroit Pistons center Andre Drummond shot a 3-pointer in practice and smiled and waved to the camera got 33 million views, Chang said.
Tencent has made a huge push into NBA content over the last few years. Chang boasted that Tencent employs as many people devoted to the NBA in China as the league itself. Tencent opened a $20 million studio in Beijing a couple of years ago that combines traditional game broadcasts with some of its own groundbreaking virtual and augmented reality technology it uses for its video gaming and ESports productions.
“You see elements of what they take from their gaming productions and put that in their NBA broadcasts,” Chang said, “being able to buy products and virtual goods that are part and parcel with how they broadcast our games.”
Obviously the game and practice content that goes to Chinese consumers has to be shot in the U.S. But “how you take that, edit it and broadcast it or publish it on social media,” Chang said, “is something that I think is very, very crucial to frankly any international market in terms of how you localize.”
Then there are the initiatives to grow the game through marketing and grassroots efforts in China itself. The league has 200 NBA Style stores across the country, "more streetwear than performance-wear," Chang said, with a new Beijing flagship store opening up in April.
“This is all basketball and the resonance of the sport in China," Chang said. "You walk down the street and you see people wear NBA gear all over the place.”
The NBA estimates that 300 million people play basketball in China, and two approaches the league has to foster growth in youth participation is through NBA Playzones and the Jr. NBA. Playzones are currently located in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, with children's activity centers geared toward children aged three to 10.
“Promoting the health and well-being as well as having a safe, clean place for parents to bring their kids," Chang said. "If you play basketball, you’re more likely to be a fan.”
The Jr. NBA in China impacts four million students, with the national champion advancing to the annual world championship in Orlando. Roughly 500,000 Chinese fans watched the inaugural Jr. NBA world championship last summer, per the league. The league also operates three NBA academies in three different provinces and one basketball school, and is working with Chinese Basketball Association President Yao Ming to improve the domestic league as well as the men's and women's national teams.
“One of the things we really want to do is help support his efforts to continue the development of league basketball in China," Chang said, "with the overall goal of growing the sport throughout the country but then at the top levels, hoping to really get them in a different league than they are today.”
One of the most important ways the NBA grows the game in China is by sending a pair of teams to play two preseason games there every year. LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers will play the Brooklyn Nets, in which Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai has a 49% stake, in Shanghai and Shenzhen in October. It will be the 27th and 28th NBA games played in China since the league began the initiative in 2004. Chang thinks the reception James will receive is on par with the reception Kobe Bryant got when he went to China, “a star draw that is almost unparalleled."
“This is the one opportunity to really engage with our product, our content, our players, our games on a real live basis,” Chang said. “And so we do everything we can to make this our signature event of the year.”
Another signature event for NBA China is the initiative at NBA games centered around the Lunar New Year, the campaign’s 8th season. You could hardly avoid seeing the plush pink dolls being tossed into stands at arenas across the league celebrating the year of the pig in addition to special Chinese-themed City Edition jerseys worn this season by the Warriors and Rockets. The league shot three different commercial spots with Damian Lillard, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Klay Thompson along with a Chinese pop star.
“What we saw this year is an increase in impressions on those commercial spots, probably tenfold in some cases,” Chang said. “That sort of stuff for us is important because we don’t have games there, so you don’t have that nightly presence in terms of going to the arena and watching the games. So how are you interacting with it, and how are we able to pull in sort of the non-hardcore fans.”
The hardcore Chinese fans are going to watch the biggest games of the week on a Thursday or Friday morning. But initiatives like Lunar New Year or marketing campaigns with Douyin and Weibo, the NBA Playzones and the NBA Style stores are aimed at the rest of the growing population and China’s burgeoning economy.
“At the heart of it, it’s about encouraging the development and the growth of the sport in China,” Chang said.
Chang echoed his boss, commissioner Adam Silver, in believing that basketball could one day outpace soccer as the most popular sport in the world.
“And clearly China would have a big part to play in that,” Chang said. “We already are, we feel, the most popular sport in China.
Chang’s job, he said, is to capitalize on that popularity, drive participation and further popularize the sport in the biggest country on earth for growth potential. Though he’s barely noticed in the Marriott lobby, it’s his role as NBA China CEO that makes Derek Chang one of the most important people in the basketball universe.
