On r/WNBA and across Reddit, Women’s basketball fans are passionate and informed, already trading advanced stats, film breakdowns and think pieces daily. So, a manicured “brand Q&A” full of traditional media-style questions would read as PR theater, not connection.
Adidas and Reddit partnered to flip that script with the Hailey Van Lith (aka “HVL”) Ask Me Anything.
Our goal? Turn Hailey’s AMA into a raw, open “rec-center confessional” built entirely from Reddit Communities’ questions, not brand copy or media narratives.
Our plan was simple:
- Give fans a real, unprecedented conversation with Haily Van Lith to ask the questions they care about, but traditional media rarely touches — from mental health and pressure to faith, draft night, and life in Chicago
- Quietly reinforce adidas’ role as a genuine supporter of women’s basketball and player well‑being, not just another logo on the jersey
- Capture AMA answers in a way that could be quickly repurposed across Reddit and Adidas channels without losing the raw, community‑first tone
- Create a surprise-and-delight Video Recap to celebrate and highlight the communities’ best questions with a video answer from HVL herself
An AMA event with “quickly repurposing” both answers and assets can make AMAs messy for the teams.
To solve for this, we:
- Created an ad hoc, real-time approvals workflow to help teams across Adidas, HVL’s extended team and Reddit track brand/talent approvals line-by-line via a custom Master Doc.
- Treated the AMA’s conversation threads as our writers’ room—pulling in every fan question into the Master Doc and tagged by theme—Career, Personal, Pressure, Misc/Reddit/Random — for quicker approvals/repurposing.
During the AMA event, we filmed HVL’s responses at a real Rec Center’s back room that did not feel like a slick set. Instead, it felt familiar to any rec-league player: foosball tables, banners, and gym-adjacent energy.
This helped the surprise-and-delight Video Recap feel:
- Authentic to the community – The visual nature underscored the raw, open and honest intention to really talk about what Reddit’s most passionate women’s basketball fans wanted.
- Radically open to tough topics – With the majority of communication tone being best conveyed by body language, having HVL answer on camera helped highlight her candidness.
- Bespoke to Reddit Users – Since every question began its like on Reddit, our job was curation, not copywriting. So answers felt like discussions on the r/WNBA subreddit community: hyper-specific, occasionally chaotic, and deeply caring.
We set out to create an AMA event that felt like r/WNBA’s voice, powered by Adidas’ access. The Reddit Communities’ response reflects that with the HVL AMA being Reddit’s top Sports AMA for all of 2025 in North America—ranking #1 in CTR, #1 in upvotes, and #1 user RSVPs.
On the AMA event itself, we drove an impressive:
- 1K+ individual RSVPs generated through pre‑, during‑, and post‑AMA promotion
- 252K viewable impressions
- a 98.3% upvote rate,
- 977 individual shares of the AMA post
From a paid media promotions perspective, both the AMA and recap video also became high‑impact brand assets. Including delivering:
- 30M+ impressions in total
- Video Recap itself achieving an 18.7% video view‑through rate (+70% higher than Reddit’s 90‑second video benchmarks) and a 18% VCR
Qualitatively, the AMA did what traditional press hits rarely do for emerging WNBA stars—it rewarded r/WNBA’s deep knowledge by turning hot‑button topics like mental health, expectations, and role changes into nuanced, empathetic conversations grounded in Hailey’s own words.
It’s a level of community-focused authenticity that you just can’t buy.
