For more than four decades, McDonald’s has sponsored a spring basketball tournament that brings together the cream of the crop from high schools around the country for head-to-head matchups, three-point contests and skill drills.

Featuring stellar young athletes in their formative years—the lineup has included LeBron James, Candace Parker, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan and A’ja Wilson, to name only a few—the McDonald’s All American Games have provided an early peek into greatness in the making.

Hardcore sports fans may be familiar with the annual event, along with its fundraising and giveback efforts, but the general public likely isn’t. That could change with a documentary series now in production and headed to Prime Video.

It’s one of the upcoming projects from Known Originals, a new division of marketing agency Known, which plans to unearth other diamonds in the rough as springboards for entertainment content that’s intended to be brand-backed but not brand-saturated.

“We’re going to help brands identify untold or under-leveraged stories and put them on a broad canvas,” Brad Roth, president of Known Originals and co-founder of Known, told Adweek. “It could be specific IP they own or something they have a deep association with that’s meaningful to their consumers or culture at large.”

Known Originals, partnering with Roc Nation and Creative Control for the unscripted McDonald’s All American Games, has a number of projects already in development with Universal Music Group and Toys “R” Us. There’s also a three-project commitment from Time Studios, which serves as a follow-up to the co-collaborators’ award-winning docuseries Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space that aired on Netflix in 2021.

More substance, less transaction

Known Originals, based in Los Angeles, aims to feed a marketing need to break out of traditional advertising channels with more substantive, less transactional content. 

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