Social media is evolving. Are you adapting? Connect with a community of brand pros and content creators at Social Media Week, May 12–14 in NYC, to learn how to keep pace with new trends and technology. Register now to save 20% on your pass.
The Big 12 Conference spent the last several years rebranding itself, but a combination of campaigns, championships, and cultural shifts made it official.
Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark took his job in August 2022, a little more than a year after the Supreme Court allowed athletes to benefit from name, image, and likeness rights deals, and the NCAA allowed them to transfer schools without taking a year off first. His predecessors added four schools to the conference for 2023—Houston, Central Florida, Cincinnati, and Brigham Young—while negotiating the exit of two of the conference’s biggest sports marketing draws, Texas and Oklahoma.
The former CEO of both Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment (which controls Barclays Center, the Brooklyn Nets, and New York Liberty, among other assets) and Roc Nation, Yormark approached the evolving conference—which hadn’t been limited to the 12 schools in its name since 2012—from a modern sports perspective. Around a month after his hiring, he announced that the Big 12 would be working with Endeavor’s WME Sports and IMG to use data analysis to build its presence in media, social, content, sponsorship, music, and entertainment—declaring the conference “open for business.”
“He knew he wanted to build relevance, he wanted to build stability, he wanted to build marketability, and he wanted to be a leader in whatever categories he could be a leader in,” said Karen Brodkin evp of content strategy and development and co-head of WME Sports. “He’s very in touch with reality on performance—where he can only control so much where his teams end up at the end of the season in terms of the rankings—but all the other ways to build relevance, to build marketability, to build a brand around the Big 12, a lot of it has been the creativity of him and his team and joining forces with Endeavor.”
In October of the same year, he hired the conference’s first CMO, Tyrel Kirkham, whose merchandising, marketing, and venue experience spans nearly two decades with the Nets, New York Mets, Los Angeles Rams, and Detroit Pistons. Translation came on as the conference’s agency of record, and the changes kept coming, with the Pac-12 collapsing and Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah joining the Big 12 in 2024.
Once the latest members fell into place, the Big 12 and Translation produced a campaign for this football and basketball season focusing on the conference as it is. With Arizona State the Big 12’s football champion, Colorado’s Travis Hunter winning the Heisman Trophy, and three of the Top 5 men’s basketball and four of the Top 10 women’s hoops teams arriving within the last two years—amid Nelly halftime shows, Shaquille O’Neal DJ sets, and WWE promo videos—the Big 12 rebrand alludes to facets of the 16-team conference beyond sports.
“We leverage the scope and scale that exists amongst the Big 12 footprint to think about—on a Saturday for football or basketball or all the sports that make up the Big 12—here’s the audience that we have in front of us, let’s go out and deliver against that,” Kirkham said. “We anchored to culture and fashion, as well as how we utilize the institutional assets that we have to ensure that our institutions are put on a pedestal.”
Mike Zavodsky is currently a partner at WME sports and its head of property solutions but worked with Yormark both as BSE’s chief revenue officer and Roc Nation’s president. He also served with Kirkham as chief business officer of the Detroit Pistons.
He noted that can be easier to sell a sports conference on placing WME-represented Nelly in its football championship halftime, WME-represented Shaq at basketball tournament festivities, or Endeavor-aligned WWE or UFC assets in Big 12 marketing if there are receptive parties on both sides of the table.
“As you’re looking at a space like the collegiate landscape, obviously there’s a lot of change, and with change comes disruption and a new way of thinking,” Zavodsky said. “If you are going to disrupt, the ability to work with familiar people that you’ve gone in the trenches with before is critical, and that overall alignment helped us collectively get to where we are today.”
It also helps when you can show your work. Jason Kirk, a social media and content strategy consultant for WME Sports, noted that the Big 12 hasn’t been afraid to ask for help in building its TikTok presence from nothing and pushing its Instagram activity to increase engagement by 165% within the last year.
In the summer of 2024, during the Big 12’s first Las Vegas media day, its social team gathered up mascots for a parody of Oceans 11 that led to a 100% increase in impressions and a $90 million boost in media value.
“While they have confidence in the things they know well, they had humility in the things they didn’t,” Kirk said. “When you lean in and try and do things differently, and then the results follow, it lays the groundwork to do it again, bigger and better.”
The Big 12’s horizons grow even more expansive later this year as it enters a six-year, nearly $2.3 billion media rights extension with ESPN and Fox that Yormark himself declared “the last big media deal that was available.” With ESPN sublicensing some of those Big 12 football and basketball games to Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT Sports and CBS Sports and Paramount+ adding games of their own through the 2026-27 season, the conference sees an even greater opportunity to extend its reach.
“It gives us an opportunity to get our narrative across, not only the conference narrative, but our institutions and student athletes as humans,” Kirkham said. “When you put in the blender with all the outside elements, like ESPN supporting our halftime and eating away at commercial inventory to showcase Nelly or Ne-Yo, that’s a testament to the exposure that our partners give us on a weekly basis.”
When Nelly played the halftime show of the Big 12 football championship between Texas and Oklahoma State in 2023, Kirkham noted that viewership and engagement metrics for the game peaked. He and his team took that as a sign that people were tuning in for Nelly, if nothing else, but could be swayed into Big 12 sports if approached correctly.
It’s why the conference teamed with Japanese streetwear brand A Bathing Ape and featured BAPE marks on its field during football and basketball championships—that just also happened to feature performances by Fat Joe and Ashanti. It’s why WME cheered an undefeated TCU team to the national championship game with help from the NBA’s Luka Donkic and his “frog,” Luka Jr.
It’s why this week’s men’s and women’s basketball championships in Kansas City feature a court designed by streetwear brand Undefeated and emblazoned with hundreds of Big 12 logos. Both Shaq and Charly Jordan are among the DJs and musicians performing during the conference tournaments.
“We knew we had an older fanbase that was very loyal, but there needed to be a through line that ultimately allowed us to speak to a younger audience,” Kirkham said. “We know that music is an important part of where we meet them. We think about the fashion aspect of where we meet them and how we push out original content to truly meet them where they are.”
Meanwhile, meeting fans where they’re at means recognizing that the Big 12’s footprint—while expanded considerably in recent years—extends far beyond the location of its schools. The conference set up youth clinics at Rucker Park in Harlem not only as a nod to alumni, but as a pitch to future student athletes. It’s sending Kansas State and Iowa State football teams to Dublin for the Aer Lingus College Football Classic in August.
Plus, its plans to play basketball and football games in Mexico, delayed since 2023, get a new look this year. Under its new brand, the Big 12 isn’t a regional conference but a growing, global concern.
“The conference footprint is now the entire country,” Brodkin said. “[Yormark] wants the Big 12 brands, schools, student athletes, and coaches to show up in parts of the world where it has not been traditional for college, whether that’s Mexico City or Dubai.”
Jason is an Adweek staff writer covering sports marketing.
Adweek is the leading source of news and insight serving the brand marketing ecosystem.
