Warning: This WNBA Campaign Will Transform You Into a Diehard Fan (If You Aren't One Already)

A'ja Wilson kicks off a series of player-focused ads

The WNBA advises “Viewer Discretion” in a campaign created by Wieden+Kennedy Portland to promote the league’s 2025 season.

The kickoff anthem, which we saw during the WNBA Draft, opens with a card warning about “offensive” footage. Next, the clip rolls out a series of thrilling game highlights. The visuals reveal—and revel in—how offensive, defensive, extremely confident and occasionally disrespectful WNBA ballers can be.

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The cheeky effort playing out across social, digital and broadcast charges forward this weekend, with a fresh promo celebrating A’ja Wilson, one of the league’s biggest stars, dropping on Saturday as the WNBA season gets underway. The spot boldly suggests that the Oxford English Dictionary update its definition of dominance to read, simply: “A’ja Wilson.”

Up next: Spots dedicated to Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Napheesa Collier and Sabrina Ionescu, released weekly prior to the WNBA All-Star Game in July.

“They’re all great players across every aspect of the game, but we identified one specific kind of positioning within their game to highlight” in each player’s commercial, WNBA chief marketing officer Phil Cook tells Muse.

Collier’s ad will herald her ruthless pursuit of defense, which won her 2024 WNBA Defensive Player of the Year honors. The campaign will fête Ionescu for helping lead the New York Liberty to its first WNBA championship last year.

This approach marks an evolution of last year’s “Welcome to the W” messaging, which centered on greeting rookies like Clark, Reese and Kamilla Cardoso as they entered the league, along with new fans.

“This year, we wanted to highlight some of the performance capabilities of some of our greatest stars,” Cook says, “We’re going after fans who have committed to the WNBA and want to dig a little deeper.”

The idea is “to allow fans to know a little bit more about the athletes that they’ve heard of and take a position on them. We know that athlete stories are what initiate fandom.”

More elite players will appear in spots rolling out after the All-Star game and into the WNBA Playoffs.