Tech
Coinbase’s NBA Playbook: No Script and a Creator Brief Built on ‘Show, Don’t Tell’
Coinbase has a front-row seat inside the NBA. Since October 2021, the crypto platform has served as the league’s official exclusive cryptocurrency platform partner, a relationship that expanded to team-level agreements with the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers for the 2024-25 season.
But an NBA arena still holds only roughly 20,000 fans. Catherine Ferdon’s early test as Coinbase’s Chief Marketing Officer was whether creator marketing could turn that sponsorship access into content that traveled beyond the building.
Catherine joined Coinbase in September 2025 after more than nine years at Cash App, where she served as its first CMO and helped scale monthly active users twenty times while revenue grew to $16 billion annually. One of her first decisions was to invest more in creator and Influencer Marketing.
“We really decided to invest more heavily in working with creators and influencers after I started,” Catherine says. “And so I’d say this is one of the first implementations of that push.”
That push produced a February 2026 NBA activation built around five creators, two games, VIP access, custom merchandise, and no scripting. With OK COOL, an influencer agency, Coinbase ran the campaign through its Brand Partnerships team and internal creative studio. As Catherine shares, the result was more than a quarter of a million impressions from a sponsorship asset originally tied to a 20,000-person live event.
Built In-House, By Design
Coinbase did not fully outsource the activation to the agency. Catherine and the Brand Partnerships team structured it that way to ensure consistency between the campaign’s influencer strategy and the company’s broader sports marketing identity.
“This was an integrated effort led totally by our internal teams,” Catherine says. “We really wanted to make sure that we were relying end-to-end on the creative team to ensure brand consistency across our sports marketing and our broader influencer strategy.”
That in-house orientation shapes how Coinbase treats its creator roster. Rather than a pool of talent to book and brief, it functions as a set of ongoing relationships anchored by what Catherine calls an “embedded journalist of fan culture” model. Creators carry the camera, but they arrive as genuine fans rather than hired voices.
The Brand Partnerships team handled the operational layer: coordinating the creator mix across both games and ensuring each activation connected back to Coinbase’s game-night sponsorship agreements with each franchise. The work of matching creators to teams and sequencing the experience fell to his team.
Gatekeepers, Not Influencers
The five creators selected for the two games were chosen for a specific reason: each had a documented, genuine connection to the team they would cover.
Austin Franklin and Henry Marken, along with Sloane Knows, attended the Warriors game. Caleb Nash Feemster and Anthony Henderson covered the Clippers activation.
“Henry is a fan favorite with the Warriors community. Austin Franklin has a pretty clear Warriors tie-back,” Catherine says. “Caleb Nash Feemster is a Clippers fan and a generally entrenched NBA influencer. Anthony does a lot of spoofs on NBA players and has direct ties to various teams.”
Catherine frames the distinction as the difference between casting and sourcing. “We don’t just want influencers who are people we cast,” she says. “We’re actually looking for gatekeepers. Creators who have built high-trust environments where their word carries a lot more weight than any brand-led campaign alone.”
Henry’s connection ran deeper than his audience demographics. He had been watching Coinbase branding at Chase Center for years before the activation.
“I knew Coinbase was the go-to and most legitimate marketplace for trading crypto,” he says. “I had also seen Coinbase commercials during NBA games and recall seeing Coinbase signage all over the Chase Center.” When the campaign invitation arrived, it landed differently than a cold brand deal. “I could not have been more excited,” he says.
‘Show, Don’t Tell’
The experience Coinbase designed was built around one operating principle: immersive access produces more credible content than a scripted endorsement.
Creators arrived to courtside warmup access, a close-up look at the Larry O’Brien championship trophy, and face time with franchise legends Zaza Pachulia and Cuttino Mobley. They watched the game from a fully branded Coinbase suite stocked with co-branded merchandise. At halftime, Coinbase brought them onto the court to participate in a T-shirt toss, firing co-branded shirts into the crowd with a T-shirt cannon.
Each creator received a custom official Warriors or Clippers team jersey reading “Team Coinbase.” The choice was intentional. “We really wanted creators to show, not tell, their VIP access,” Catherine explains. “By wearing Team Coinbase apparel while experiencing VIP treatment, the audience draws a natural connection between our brand and exclusive access without us needing a hard call to action.” The idea came directly from Coinbase’s in-house creative studio.
The brief gave creators light direction in terms of stylistic, tonal, and thematic approach. No scripts, minimal cues, and no mandated sponsorship language. “The brief was really built on the philosophy that seeing a creator authentically experience a game is more powerful than a scripted ad,” Catherine says. “We wanted the content to feel almost like you’re watching a friend’s Instagram story: lo-fi, native, high trust.”
Henry describes Coinbase as “very communicative and open to my creative process and concept ideas.” The platform strategy followed the same logic. Creators posted on whatever channels they had built their audiences on. Coinbase did not prescribe platforms.
The Meeting That Didn’t Happen
One element the team considered and then walked back was a player meet-and-greet.
The decision came down to a content licensing constraint. “We explored player meet-and-greet opportunities, but ultimately we decided against it due to the implied player endorsement restriction across the content,” Catherine says. Any footage featuring active NBA players in an endorsement-adjacent context could not be used in the final social rollout.
The workaround, routing face time through retired franchise legends rather than current roster members, preserved both the premium access feel and the ability to deploy the resulting content. Henry cited the moment with Zaza Pachulia as the highlight of the night. “It was a surreal moment to have a one-on-one conversation with him and even get to make content with him,” he says.
The episode reveals something about how the experience design actually worked: every element had to serve the content, not just the event. The jersey, the suite, the halftime cannon, and the retired player appearances were all selected with that constraint in mind.
‘Of Course Coinbase Would Be Here’
Anthony Henderson, one of the Clippers-game creators, described the activation on his own channels as a “Coinbase Takeover.” The phrase was unprompted. Catherine treats it as the clearest signal that the campaign worked.
“Success for us is measured when the Coinbase brand is viewed as a natural participant in the fan experience rather than an interruption,” she says. “We’re really looking for such a seamless integration that people begin to think, ‘Of course, Coinbase would be here.'”
The campaign generated more than 250,000 impressions and a 2.5% engagement rate across creator content. Beyond those figures, Catherine points to harder-to-quantify emotional reactions: reposts, comments, and community discussion. “Those little nuggets are like gold for us,” she says. “We just love to know that people are having our marketing elicit a reaction.”
For brands building influencer strategies around live events, the structural lesson from Coinbase is specific: the arena is the pretext, not the product. The game-night sponsorship unlocks the access; the creator turns that access into content that travels. Running the operation in-house, rather than through an agency, is what allowed Coinbase to maintain that logic consistently from experience design through to platform distribution.
Catherine plans to extend the model across other categories, from music to culinary creators, with the in-house team remaining the organizing principle.
“Instead of a creator just telling their audience, ‘Coinbase is so cool, Coinbase gives you VIP access,’ they’re actually showing themselves walking courtside and going behind the scenes,” she says. “The audience draws the connection to themselves. And that’s even more powerful than a CTA or a product placement.”
Photo source: @coinbase
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