State Farm kicks off new brand platform with Caitlin Clark ad

State Farm is doing some spring cleaning.

With the WNBA season and the weather both heating up as the NBA season winds down, the insurance company, which is deeply invested in basketball across multiple leagues, debuted a new brand platform starting with an ad featuring one of the biggest names on its sponsorship roster: Caitlin Clark.

The platform, called “With the Assist,” will serve as a long-term unifier across State Farm’s marketing, with content “spotlighting real-life assists on and off the court,” according to Kristyn Cook, State Farm’s chief agency, sales, and marketing officer.

In the first ad under the platform, Clark, who’s famous for sinking 3-point shots from the logo at center court, notes that everything seems to be easier for her from the logo—at which point brand mascot Jake from State Farm paints the company’s three circles on different spots around her house so Clark can do things like open pickle jars and sort laundry with ease.

Cook said the decision to center the debut ad around Clark was designed to capitalize on her popularity heading into her second season in the WNBA.

“We try to stand out among nonendemic brands in particular, and part of that is knowing when to look around the corner and move,” Cook told Marketing Brew. “We knew that as [Clark] goes into her second year, there’s going to be a lot of eyeballs and attention on these moments in particular. Timing often is everything, so when you can align the timing for a new platform with something where culture is finding itself too, it just makes sense for us to lean in there.”

Pass it off: The “With the Assist” platform was born out of the idea that assists are often “the difference-maker” on the court, Cook said. Since the State Farm brand has been built on the idea of helping like a neighbor might, Cook’s team decided to mirror assists in sports with assists in other scenarios, she said.

Clark, who has worked with the brand since her Iowa days, broke the WNBA record for most assists in a single season last year, so it was perhaps only logical that she helped kick off the campaign. The ad started running May 21 on linear, streaming, digital, and social platforms during the NBA playoffs and WNBA regular season games.

Like a good sponsor: While the Clark ad, called “From the Logo,” was timed to the start of the WNBA season, Cook said that the broader “With the Assist” platform is meant to have a presence stretching into some of the other basketball properties that State Farm sponsors, including the women’s 3-on-3 league Unrivaled and development leagues from the sports media company and league operator Overtime.

Cook’s team hasn’t decided exactly which athletes will follow in Clark’s footsteps, but the goal, Cook told us, is to see how other athletes the brand has access to “will fit into the stories that we try to tell as we move forward.” Regardless of the specific campaign and athlete, State Farm campaigns are all meant to drive brand awareness and consideration, with an increasing focus on fans of women’s hoops, Cook told us.

“As we’ve done more in women’s basketball, [among] our existing customers, it’s driving even more brand loyalty,” she said. “We’re even seeing, anecdotally, where customers are thanking their State Farm agents for State Farm’s commitment to women’s sports…That’s certainly not measurable, but we know that we’re on the right track.”

Magic trick: Prior to the debut of “With the Assist,” State Farm was churning out work under its “Right Kind of Magic” platform, which started running in 2023 and includes a series of spots centered around people accidentally summoning the wrong kind of assistance during calamities. Clark was also involved in that platform, in a spot where she is summoned to help after a rookie driver backs into a garage door.

The start of a new platform doesn’t necessarily mean the disappearance of the old one, Cook said, but for now, her team is putting their focus and media spend mainly on getting their latest work off the ground.

“This is our priority, to get the ’With the Assist’ platform not just launched, but firmly supplanted into people’s both awareness and their emotional connection with our brand, especially as we deepen our investment in women’s sports,” Cook said. “At the end of the day, that’s where the growth is. That’s where the fans are that we want to attract, and it’s smart business for us, and we just think this platform is a great way to reach them.”