How WBD Scored Ad Wins Amid NBA All-Star Ratings Struggles

The new NBA All-Star format drew mixed reviews from both viewers and players, but sponsors still bought into Warner Bros. Discovery’s vision for the weekend.

According to Jon Diament, Warner Bros. Discovery’s evp of advertising sales, the company sold out the entire weekend’s ad inventory for NBA All-Star 2025 on TNT, truTV, TBS, Bleacher Report, House of Highlights, and Max. WBD’s revenue for the event increased 8% year over year, while the number of brands spending $1 million or more was up 24%.

While the weekend served as a farewell to TNT’s coverage of NBA All-Star festivities, with TNT Sports’ broadcast rights deal with the league ending later this year, it was also a reminder that the company’s evolving contribution to the league will look similar to its current incarnation in many ways. 

“We are rooted in the next generation of NBA fans through Bleacher Report and our social footprint, so it’s not just a TV product,” Diament said. “We have huge activations with concerts and fan festivals, so it’s really a 360 relationship that we have with the league… [and] when we go to our partners—such as Kia, Amex, Google, State Farm—they take advantage of all those elements, and they don’t just buy our linear commercials.“

On its face, NBA All-Star had a rough weekend with ratings.

All-Star Saturday Night drew just 3.4 million viewers, its smallest audience ever, as Caitlin Clark declined a 3-point contest invite and Mac McClung won his third slam dunk title in a field largely devoid of stars. In addition, Sunday’s revamped, tournament-style All-Star Game, with its target score, multiple stoppages, and 20-minute tribute to TNT’s Inside the NBA team of Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley, Ernie Johnson, and Shaquille O’Neal, drew 4.7 million viewers across WBD platforms. That’s second only to the 2023 game as the smallest audience in the event’s history. 

Even players who enjoyed the format were less than thrilled with the pauses.

“Get them outta here.”

— Jaylen Brown 😂pic.twitter.com/lj16X0OrV1

— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) February 17, 2025

But lost amid the complaints was what Diament and sponsors already knew: NBA All-Star was the biggest draw among viewers ages 35 and under as TNT makes its run to the NBA playoffs. Because All-Star’s “got good demos” and “hits a lot of metrics,” Diament estimates that it draws a mix of brands that are 50% league sponsors and 50% athlete sponsors or non-sports brands that want to show up in a big way over the weekend.

Combining WBD’s own team with that of the NBA’s Julie Morris, who serves as the league’s svp of commercial development and media, Diament’s sellers point out those ideal demographics and the fact that there aren’t many tentpole events that can outdraw them. The two events that managed bigger audiences than All-Star over the weekend—ABC’s Four Nations Face-Off hockey game (4.4 million viewers on Saturday) and NBC’s SNL 50 anniversary show (14.8 million viewers on Sunday)—were one-off broadcasts.

“We had such a long history with the league. They trust us to be creative and be innovative and that we will do it within the guidelines of what the league is looking for, so that’s why they’re willing to take risks with us,” Diament said. “That doesn’t happen with new partners. That happens with lifelong partners.”

Putting in work

For WBD, collaborating with partners could mean listening to Steph Curry when he has an idea for a new All-Star format, or it could mean expanding both TNT Sports’ and the NBA’s footprint—and those of its partners—beyond the court. 

At the beginning of All-Star Weekend, Diament looked outside his hotel room just off of San Francisco’s Powell Street at roughly 6 a.m. and counted about 2,000 people waiting in line at a Foot Locker activation. According to Diament, a healthy portion of that crowd fell among the 12- to 35-year-olds targeted by WBD’s Bleacher Report, which tends to focus more on the culture of the game than what’s happening on the court. 

Bleacher Report maintains a significant presence at NBA All-Star because of what Diament sees as the NBA and its players’ distinct influence on culture.

“Bleacher Report is there to report on it and amplify what those things are, so that can be in the form of sneakers, what kind of music they’re playing, what kind of cars they are driving, what they’re wearing, who their girlfriends or wives might be,” Diament said. “Typically, that NBA fan interested in that type of content is younger, and advertisers love younger audiences, so you don’t necessarily have to just advertise in a televised game to reach the NBA fan.”

They’ve got next

As Diament pointed out, Bleacher Report will still have rights to NBA coverage and content even after WBD’s broadcast deal with the league concludes. The company will also continue producing Inside the NBA for ESPN as part of a new deal that earned Shaq a $15 million contract and TNT Sports new rights to Big 12 college football and basketball games. 

That gives WBD some valuable NBA-related assets moving forward, especially as it’s lent talent and resources to All-Star events on the ground in San Francisco. TNT Sports opened All-Star Weekend by partnering with American Express on a live Inside the NBA broadcast at the city’s Pier 48 before hosting a show by Chance the Rapper. It joined Amex for another Pier 48 show on Saturday night with Noah Kahan and gave a great deal of its efforts to a department-store-sized American Express activation on Powell Street.

TNT Sports lent images and footage of Inside the NBA hosts to games taken right from broadcasts and, at one point in the week, had Ernie Johnson engage in a deeply researched interview with Detroit Pistons first-time All-Star Cade Cunningham and his family.

“We don’t take our relationship with the league lightly, and Ernie is a great example of that,” Diament said. “He didn’t mail it in: He genuinely cared about the interview and did his homework and did it as professionally as you possibly can. He’s a great example of what we try to do at TNT sports with our marketing partners, where we want to listen to them and do homework on their business objectives, and not just be a vendor, but also be a partner.”