PHILADELPHIA 76ERS | PLAYOFF LAUNCH

PHILA UNITE

THE STORY

For five years, the Sixers didn't make the playoffs, on purpose…

They called it the process, tearing the team down to build it back through the draft, and asking a whole city to trust a plan that looked like losing. Fans took the criticism with them. Then the young core arrived, Embiid, Simmons, Fultz, and the team broke back into the playoffs. After five years of being told to wait, Philadelphia finally had something to rally around. The Sixers needed a campaign big enough to hold what the city was feeling.

WHAT WE UNCOVERED

Philadelphia rallies around a team, but gets passionate about a fight.

This is a city that takes its identity from grit, from being counted out and proving it wrong, and the process had put the whole fanbase through exactly that. So the campaign couldn't be about basketball. It had to be about the city itself, its history, its chip on the shoulder, its refusal to quit. We found the idea in Philadelphia's own past: Benjamin Franklin's 1754 call to the colonies, join or die. We turned it into the rally cry the moment needed. Unite or die. Phila Unite.

THE NARRATIVE

The idea went to the streets before it was ever announced.

Working with local artist Glossblack, murals went up across the city at night, each one carrying the Sixers logo, the snake from Franklin's cartoon, and a call to a specific neighborhood, Fishtown Unite, West Philly Unite. No explanation. The city found them, and started asking where the next one would appear. The mystery did the work, neighborhood by neighborhood, until the campaign launched into a city already talking about it.

From there it spread through the people who are Philadelphia, Questlove, Dawn Staley, Bernard Hopkins, Carli Lloyd, voices the city already trusted. The rally cry ran through everything, the streets, the concourse, the court, the events outside the arena before every playoff game. By tip-off, Phila Unite wasn't a slogan the team handed down. It was something the city was already chanting back.