Roku/NBA

NBA All-Star Weekend brand tie-ins are unmissable, as each event holds a different title sponsor, sneaker and clothing companies do special All-Star drops, and every league partner has a pop-up on site.

On occasion, a brand promotion ends up being too good and ends up backfiring a bit for the league or its partner. This year, the NBA had a promo for All-Star along with Nike and Jordan Brand where fans could link their NBA account with their Nike account, vote for which shoe Jayson Tatum would wear in the All-Star Game, and they’d get 12 months of free NBA League Pass. That’s a considerable offer for fans, and many took advantage of it.

However, it was not the best conceived promo because all you had to do was use the ALLSTARTATUM promo code in the League Pass ordering menu and you could bypass the entire promotion to get free League Pass for a year. Unsurprisingly, once folks on social media recognized this on Thursday, the promo code got passed around and tens of thousands of people (or more) used the code to load a free year of League Pass to their account, causing the NBA to eventually shut down the code.

While the NBA probably wasn’t expecting to give out millions of dollars in free League Pass, it’s honestly not the worst thing that could happen. Having a promo go viral that gets fans access to watch a years worth of games isn’t really a bad thing for the league, especially since the NBA has been trying to bring in more eyeballs onto regular season games for years. This might not have been the way they wanted to do it, but maybe they end up with a few more folks watching a random Monday night slate in March this way.

Source: https://uproxx.com/dimemag/nba-contest-promo-tatum-shoes-free-league-pass-shut-down/