Founded by Dennis Page, 'SLAM MAGAZINE', was born as a basketball magazine that combined sport with hip hop culture, at a time when the genre became increasingly popular. Hardly a brand managed to portray the connection of these two universes as organically as SLAM.
Over its 26 years, the magazine has become a highly respected platform, mainly for its quick turnaround time in connecting with all levels of basketball, and for offering its readers exclusive and quality content. The magazine featured countless players on its cover, in addition to eternalizing great moments in the history of the sport.
Iconic magazine covers still live in the memory of basketball enthusiasts, like the first issue that brought Larry Johnson at the peak of his career at Charlote Hornets. Allen Iverson and his ‘black power’ in the retro Sixers uniform. Lamar Odom, Elton Brand and Darius Miles, changing their Los Angeles Clippers shirts, in which years later Lou Will, Trezz and Pat Bev repeated the fact, among so many other stories.
Magazines no longer have a source of revenue through their subscriptions in the digital age. Many titles had their circulation and releases interrupted or rescheduled, and with SLAM, it was no different. Today, the magazine puts out new issues every two months and no longer every month.
Brands like SLAM and many others, mainly those that come from previous editorial generations, take the time to reinvent themselves and define strategies based on social networks, to keep the public that already exists, but also to gain a new audience, consequently new advertisers. In these highly competitive digital times, the brand needs to be authentic and develop content that actually adds up, only then will it become visible with the engagement it generated.
In addition to the printed version, SLAM managed to generate even more value for the brand due to its repositioning strategy. An example of this was the success of the broadcast of the SLAM Summer Classic at Dyckman Park, a tournament that had the participation of high school athletes, which put together more than 420,000 people connected on Facebook. As a strategy for its positioning, SLAM realized that it could connect even more with the pillars of basketball, and through Instagram created accounts focused on content coverage coming from the NBA, college basketball, sneakers, WNBA, fashion, games and past releases of its editions, an initiative that attracted millions of followers.
One of these accounts is League Fits, which tracks how players dress and what they wear when they aren’t playing The account, which has 531,800 followers, publishes the most varied styles among players from the league, and also gives space to the “League Fits Challenge”, in which followers send photos dressed with inspirations from the clothes worn by an athlete.
An interesting strategy is that when the magazine recognizes a potential young talent for its results, it tends to cover it for a long time until its professional phase. A classic example is LeBron James, who was already prominent at the age of 16, and has been followed ever since, currently as the star of the Los Angeles Lakers.
Even though magazines have become somewhat less frequent, being on the cover of SLAM is important for any basketball player, it is almost like a stamp certificate recognizing that a player really made it, becoming a professional NBA player.