Ball On A Budget™ 2024: Chime’s slam dunk with the WNBA
Karen Uyenco is a huge basketball and WNBA fan—and even has her own podcast featuring women’s sports. So when this year’s Ball On A Budget activation came across her desk, she was pretty excited: “It’s a dream to take on this kind of project in my nine to five,” she says. “I jumped at the opportunity to expand upon the work the team did last year and put a new spin on the campaign.”
Last year, ChimeⓇ launched our first Ball On A Budget activation, where we challenged NBA stars to create a tunnel-worthy outfit for $300 or less. Players visited local thrift and vintage stores, putting together outfits that fit within the budget. It was Chime’s top-performing activation of 2024, raking in 24.6M views, 213M+ impressions, and several headlines.
Bringing Ball On A Budget back.
Over the years, Karen and many other WNBA fans have watched the league rise and grow in reach. Such growth, coupled with her personal passion and insights into Chime members, made Karen sure that partnering with the WNBA would be a slam dunk for Ball On A Budget’s second act.
“Our members and broader brand audience are interested in basketball, and we wanted to highlight the natural intersection of fashion within basketball culture with Ball On A Budget,” Karen explains. “With this activation, we can lean into the reach and notoriety of fashion-forward athletes while showing that they can look great without breaking the bank—and encouraging our members to do the same.”
Although Karen knew that partnering with the WNBA would be an awesome play to run for the second iteration of Ball On A Budget, she and the team wanted to gather some data to back it up before pitching it. They got to work digging into the numbers and learned that:
- WNBA players are already known for their style: Many WNBA players have built a reputation around their personal styles, as seen on social handles like SLAM’s @LeagueFits.
- They have a lot to play with: Women in the league wear and play with a large range of styles.
Chime’s members are predominantly women (58%)—and 32% of Chime’s members are Black women. - With the data in support of making it happen for Ball On A Budget with the WNBA, Karen and the team got to work.
Meet the team
- Karen Uyenco, Senior Social Media Strategist
- Chad Foster, Senior Strategic Brand Partnerships Manager
- Kaye Oleo, Director, Brand Social
- Ryan Brown, Creative Director
- Tyler Bass, Associate Creative Director
- Brad Zwakenberg, Copywriter
- Nate Costa, Art Director & Motion Designer
- Graham Eschrich, Motion Designer
Sticking with thrifting.
For round two of the activation, the team weighed whether to keep the challenge focused on thrifting or not, ultimately sticking with thrifting because of what it represents for Chime’s members and the current culture. “Thrifting is having its moment again, and trends suggest it’s here to stay,” Karen says. In fact:
- Secondhand shopping is becoming a global phenomenon, expected to grow 127% by 20261.
- #ThriftTok alone has 1.6 billion views and #vintageclotheshaul has over 2.1 billion views on TikTok.
- 64% of Gen Z say that they look for an item secondhand, rather than buying it new.2
“It was important to listen to our audience’s voice and tune into their interests to inform this activation,” Kaye explains. “They were loud and clear that thrifting is where we should focus.”
For tips on how to up your thrifting game from this year’s WNBA stars, check out our In the Green blog.
Partnering with SLAM magazine
To ensure the activation was a hit, the team decided to amplify Ball On A Budget with an external partner. They teamed up with SLAM Magazine to produce and distribute the campaign, finding alignment in the company’s media presence in basketball culture and their LeagueFits Instagram handle, the leading platform for discovering the latest in NBA and WNBA fashion.
“When identifying the right partner to help us tell these amazing stories, it was important to choose one that not only has credibility in the sport of basketball but also one that centers and champions women athletes,” Chad explains. “Since its inception, SLAM has been an arbiter of basketball culture, and through partnering with them, we gained an authentic voice and point of view among fans, while still maintaining our uniquely Chime voice and mission of unlocking financial progress.”
Bringing Ball On A Budget to life.
At Chime, we’re all about inclusivity and leaning into what other brands aren’t doing—so we wanted to be one of the first consumer brands to partner with the WNBA athletes. “Ball On A Budget is an opportunity to amplify women, show a different side of the athletes that don’t often get the coverage in media, and use our insights to drive a meaningful activation for our audience,” Karen says.
One of the first steps in bringing Ball On A Budget to life was selecting talent. The team leaned into SLAM and LeagueFits partners to identify the most talked-about WNBA stars with style. “We wanted to make sure the athletes we chose are known for both their skills on the court and their style off-court,” Karen explains. They also wanted to find athletes with a personal connection to money, financial progress, and paying it forward.
They assembled an all-star (and all-style) team, including:
- Arike Ogunbowale
- Lexie Brown
- Chelsea Gray
- Kamilla Cardoso
To shoot the videos, the Chime team traveled to each of the players’ home cities—LA, Dallas, Vegas, and Chicago—and visited local thrift stores. The team partnered with SLAM creatively to develop the script outlines, look and feel, and narrative flow. At every turn, they stayed focused on telling authentic stories about the athletes and creating engaging content to share with our audiences. “We wanted to highlight the athletes’ personalities, which we don’t always see when they’re in competition mode on the court,” Karen says.
The team also wanted to create an inclusive campaign: “As marketers, we work in the fun social space, but what we really want to do is tell inclusive stories—and this campaign really let us do that,” she says. “Because women in the WNBA usually receive less coverage than their male counterparts, when they are featured, it’s often focused only on their games and stats. This campaign gave us an opportunity to showcase these stars’ personal stories, financial knowledge, and style.”
Visually, the team evolved the series, allowing Chime to show up in an impactful and culturally relevant way. “While the fonts and colors are grounded in Chime's branding, we pushed our boundaries for this series,” explains Tyler Bass, Chime’s Associate Creative Director. “Our goal was to create an engaging content series, and the enhanced graphical treatments certainly contributed to that.”
Bringing Ball On A Budget to All-Star weekend.
The team brought the Ball On A Budget series to life for WNBA players, community, fans, and Chime members in Phoenix, Arizona during the league’s All-Star weekend with the Chime presents LeagueFits Experience.
The event included a VIP party Friday night for the League's most stylish players, as well as influencers and leaders in women's basketball. All attendees entered via a pop-up tunnel walk to imitate their entrance to the court.
We rounded out the weekend with a day of consumer-facing programming, including vintage shopping, on-site t-shirt customizations, and a panel called Money Moves, where Phoenix Mercury star Natasha Cloud, agent Camille Buxeda, stylist Sydney Bordonaro, and host Ros Gold-Onwude had an amazing conversation about hoops, fashion and finance.
Keeping our members in the game.
As with everything Chime does, we tried to stay member-obsessed (one of our core values) throughout the entire activation. “We’re privileged to work in social media because we get to see authentic conversations happening in real-time and can understand what people like our members care about,” Kaye says. “We used our frequent member interactions to inform how this activation took shape.”
Because of our presence on social and close connection to our members, the team had a firm grasp on how our members talk about money and style—and could integrate that into Ball On A Budget to ensure it would be an engaging activation. The scripts, topics, and prompts for the athletes reflected many themes our social media team has seen across channels, like tipping culture and takeout vs. eating at home. “The end result was a series of content that is relevant to our members, interesting to a broader audience, and an authentic representation of the athletes we partnered with,” says Karen. “That’s a winning combination for us.”
Being team players.
While Ball On A Budget focused on WNBA athletes off the court, it required a full-press effort from the Chime and SLAM teams, who worked together to deliver some top-notch content. “I love being collaborative, and I took my love of basketball and experience playing team sports into being a team player on this project,” Karen says. “This activation involved leaning into each others’ strengths and finding where we can all fill gaps.”
The result of their hard work? This season's Ball On A Budget is a case study on the integrated ways the team can work most impactfully as a brand marketing team. “From unlocking a consumer insight to developing the creative campaign to identifying a partner to help bring it to life, we've demonstrated how working collaboratively can create meaningful content that helps crystalize Chime's mission,” Chad says.
The bottom line for the whole team came down to Chime’s members—as it always does. “We’re so grateful to create content that resonates with our members,” Karen says. “The fact that it overlaps with our personal interests made this an even more rewarding career moment for all of us,” says Karen.