Those of us of a certain age remember when Saturday morning TV featured Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal playing some pretty fancy basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters, as the team’s spunky theme music (“Sweet Georgia Brown” as rendered by the Bones Brothers) played in the background.
Even though the team has never stopped touring – regularly hitting as many as 400 stops each year – it’s been years since the Globetrotters have been considered a household name or even a regular media presence. Bronwen O’Keefe, head of global content and marketing for the Harlem Globetrotters, joined Herschend Entertainment Studios and Harlem Globetrotters President Keith Dawkins in 2022 with a plan to return the team to its former glory. O’Keefe chatted with Spotlight about everything the Globetrotters are doing to rebuild and expand the brand ahead of its 100th anniversary in 2026.
Spotlight: Before we get into it, why don’t you bring us up to date on what led you to the Harlem Globetrotters?
Bronwen O’Keefe: My background is primarily in the content space. I spent the bulk of my career at Nickelodeon, based in New York. Over that time, I had the great fortune to try my hand at everything. I have experience in animation, in live action, and in all the different demographics that Nickelodeon has served, including adults. I found the real sweet spot for me was live action. Towards the end of my tenure there, I ran the whole live-action business, including development and production of anything that wasn't a cartoon, for any demographic.
I left Nickelodeon in 2018 and started my own production company, and did some consulting. I produced a movie and an animated series. And then a former Nickelodeon colleague, Keith Dawkins, who is now president of Globetrotters and Herschend Entertainment Studios, called me up shortly after he started in January 2022 and asked if I would come on board to consult and build out a content strategy for the Globetrotters, and then also one for Herschend and their in-studio team. That was roughly two and a half years ago.
One of the things we did at Nick was build out a couple of specific brands across some of our ancillary channels, like Nick Toons and Team Nick. While doing that, we both really developed a passion for using sports as a medium for storytelling. Transferring that storytelling passion I've always had into sports and into what the Globetrotters are is really this perfect combination of entertainment and sports, which is a ripe opportunity for storytelling.
Spotlight: Your background is really more content, but at the Globetrotters you are head of global content and marketing. Do you find that the marketing piece of this comes pretty naturally?
O’Keefe: I do have some marketing background. One of the things that I did at Nickelodeon was build a brand new brand for them called Nick Mom that was a block of content that aired on the back end of the new Nick Jr. channel, as well as a corresponding website. This was before apps were popular, and we were still dealing with websites, and I was employee number one. It was like ‘okay, we have a name now, go build something, you have 18 months to do it.’ Through that process, I built a whole team, including the marketing team, and then ran the marketing campaign and approach for the launch of that brand.
But even if I hadn't had that experience, to me, marketing is storytelling as much as content is. It's just you're telling the story of a brand, as opposed to the story of a specific set of characters. I feel like this has been an incredible opportunity for me to take my passion for storytelling and put it through the lens of marketing.
Spotlight: When you have an established brand like this that you are looking to revive and evolve, how do you build a content strategy around it?
O’Keefe: IP is at the base of every content opportunity. The Globetrotters is beloved IP that has the opportunity to extend into all kinds of executions. The way we think about content right now is truly platform agnostic, because our viewers are platform agnostic. The younger the generation, the more platform agnostic they are, and they actually demand to have a touch point everywhere that they are.
When we think about how we want to take this IP and do some storytelling around it, and build it out as something that has franchise potential, we have to think about how it's going to work across every platform. Platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime are here to tell broad media stories. Now they’re getting into live sports and that's a different muscle that they're learning to exercise. If we approach it as what we are offering with respect to content that can work on any platform and for any size screen and for any viewer, regardless of demo, we're covering all the bases, and we're giving ourselves as much opportunity as possible.
Audiences are so fragmented now, and we're so used to everything in the world becoming bespoke for us and for what we want specifically on an individual level, I think there's great opportunity to to reach all those different segmentations with one singular content idea executed across so many different manifestations.
"IP is at the base of every content opportunity," -- Bronwen O'Keefe, head of global content and marketing, Harlem Globetrotters
Spotlight: You joined as a consultant in April 2022, and then came on board full time at the beginning of 2023, so you haven’t been there that long. But tell us what you have launched during that time.
O’Keefe: My real focus was building out a really robust slate of content for the Globetrotters, which was brought to fruition really quickly with our first series hitting the air in a fall of 2022, Play it Forward on NBC, Telemundo, Cozi and Peacock.
On Thursday, December 5, we launched a new travel series on Aspire TV called Secrets of the City. Who better to guide you through a non-traditional tourist experience than the Globetrotters? It's literally in our name. We're really excited to have launched that.
We launched our first original long-form program on our YouTube channel called My Rookie Season, which is a docu-follow of our rookies from their own perspectives, telling their own stories.
We have this really robust slate of content, a lot of which is meant to show a comprehensive view of the Globetrotters, because we are turning 100 in 2026, which is an incredible opportunity from a marketing perspective to tell our story in the way that we want to.
Spotlight: I certainly remember the Globetrotters and players like Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal from when I was a kid but it’s been a while since they’ve been something I’ve heard about in the day to day. What was the state of the Globetrotters when you got there? And what are your goals for the Globetrotters going forward?
O’Keefe: For the past 20 to 30 years, the Globetrotters were operating as a tour-only business, and that tour was a really successful business, with upwards of 400 dates per year, and the large majority of those in North America. It was great, but it forced people to come to them, and the world stopped operating that way.
So the advent of social media, the fact that the tour wasn't a 365-day-a-year execution of the brand, all led right up into COVID, where, if 95 cents of every dollar was derived off of the tour, you hit COVID, and you became a five-cent business. That's not a sustainable model.
The heart of the Globetrotters is a beloved global IP that showed us in late 70s, early 80s, that it can be at the pinnacle of cultural zeitgeist. People say to us a lot: ‘Are you back to that time?’ The answer is we're looking to take it much further than that.
And I think we can because we are now in dialogue with the audience every single week of every year through Play It Forward. Our social media and digital following is upwards of 4 million people. We've got great strategic partners like Chuck E. Cheese that are extending our touch points and the places where we are showing up for our audience. We are building out a really robust consumer products business with IMG as our exclusive licensing and merchandising partner. We're building out our corporate and social responsibility program, the Goodwill Ambassador Initiative, so that that can create more impact in communities, but also drive the brand further and bring in potential new partners for us across a variety of different ways.
We're really looking at building this out to everywhere our audience is, and we are unique in that we do have an audience that spans ages 2 to 99 so it requires us to be everywhere. In the same way that we develop our content to be platform agnostic, we have to look at our brand being platform agnostic so that we can show up in your comic book, we can show up on 60 Minutes, we can show up in a sweatshirt or a merch piece that you buy at a game when you come to one of the tour stops. It's really incumbent on us to ensure that we are not asking our fan base to come to us, but that we are showing up to where they already are.
Spotlight: How are you getting the brand in front of Gen Alpha and Gen Zs, considering how hard they are to reach? And how are you getting people to come watch Play It Forward on the various platforms, since people don’t really sit and surf anymore? Have you noticed any uptick in people coming to the tour because Play It Forward is on the air?
O’Keefe: NBC and Peacock have their own marketing campaigns that they run against all of their content. We're also fortunate to live in a block called the educational and informational block, and that is all content that is developed to be appropriate for any audience. We're thrilled with the ratings that we have for the show. Our average footprint of the tour in any given year might be a little upwards of a million people. We're reaching close to 1.5 million people every week with Play It Forward. Right there is great brand expansion and a broadening of brand awareness.
It's hard to directly quantify, in a way that means this rating equals this number of tickets, I would say we definitely have seen a growth in brand awareness and affinity. We are seeing more people that are new ticket purchasers coming to tour versus ones that we've had in the past. So that's a good indicator that all of these other efforts that we're putting into place are working.
We've been growing our social following at a pretty rapid pace, and that's a big area of investment for us. The way we get to the back end of Millennials, all of Z and even into the beginnings of Alpha is through social and digital. We've been there in the past, but not in a way that's been really robust and largely from a marketing perspective. So until now we’ve done that more from the perspective of ‘here's an ad telling you to buy tickets to the tour,’ than one of ‘let's give you narrative that gets you engaged in a way that's real and meaningful.’
We have amazing athletes on our rosters right now that are not household names. That is another piece of what we are doing. We’re really looking to blow the star potential of marquee players up because they are just as talented, just as great entertainers, just as incredible athletes as the ones you remember. It's just that the world was a lot simpler then. Digital and social is really our best way to not only get at that audience, but it is that audience that is going to influence all the audiences. They're really driving the trends.
One of the reasons we think we have been able to be so successful at broadening the reach of our brand and really grow it through strategic partnerships and broadcast deals is because the decision makers in those seats are in that demographic that grew up with the brand. So it's a nostalgic feeling for them. We never worry about what somebody will feel once they come to the Globetrotter brand, they're going to love it. It's nothing but pure joy.
So for all of those decision makers, they have that nostalgic joy and wealth of good, warm feeling about the brand, so they're excited to make a deal with us. What we risk by relying on that strategy alone is that in 20 years, the 20-year-olds are now going to be sitting in those decision-making seats, and they may not have that nostalgic pull, they may not have that warm and fuzzy feeling inside because we missed them. So we need to stem that now.
Spotlight: I recently did a Q&A with Will Trowbridge, who heads a social agency, Saylor. And one thing he said is that social has gotten really pay to play, and that you need to either have a pre-existing giant following or a lot of money to build a social following. You said you guys have something like 4 million followers, so you’ve already got that piece, but how have you found working in the current social environment?
O’Keefe: What it really boils down to is the engagement. It's great if you have somebody following you, but if they're not sharing your post, if they're not commenting, if it's not hitting them emotionally in some way, then you're not really building a fan. And I think the same way about what we do in social as I do about building out content. Are you emotionally connecting with what you're seeing on that screen? Because if you are, then great, you've got a fan for life. If you're not emotionally connecting to them, then they might just skip over you.
Our next level of real focus is around deepening that level of engagement and ensuring that we become the posts that everybody can't wait to share with their friends. I think that if we correlate that to the way that people react to a game we’ll have success. After a game, every person in that audience is feeling the same kinds of things. They're feeling joy, laughter, warmth, positivity, inspiration and aspiration, and that’s the same if they're 99 or if they're five and it's their first time seeing it.
Spotlight: You're getting ready to celebrate your 100th anniversary in 2026. As you said, that's a great marketing opportunity. Now you're reaching out to appeal to a younger demographic and you are telling them that you’ve been around a long time, but we are also young and fun and new. How do you bridge that gap so as not to turn off your younger audiences?
O’Keefe: It's a great question, and it’s a good challenge for us. I think one of the approaches we use internally is that all those 100 years just make us better at doing what we do. We've not stopped innovating, and we'll continue to innovate based on what this landscape looks like, not the one that existed 100 years ago.
Everybody has to do that, whether they're a one-year-old company or they're a 100-year-old company. You have to keep evolving. You have to keep making sure that you're staying current with your audience, or even staying ahead of your audience, anticipating what they're going to want and need from you. That's no different if you're 99 years old, or if you're in your infancy.
