Ray-Ban

Reach a New York audience through an athlete whose personality carries off the court as well as on it — without the partnership reading as a rented endorsement.

Eyewear is a category where the talent has to actually look like someone who wears the product. A misfit is obvious in the first frame, and no amount of media spend fixes it.

Josh Hart. A Knicks starter in the brand’s largest US market, with a personal style already legible to the audience the campaign needed to reach.

The argument for him was not follower count. It was fit: a player whose off-court presence was already consistent with the product, in the city where the brand most wanted to be seen.

Rate and deliverables negotiated against a defined usage window rather than an open-ended licence — the single term that most often costs a brand money later, and the one talent representation pushes hardest on.

Exclusivity scoped to the category rather than the calendar, so the talent kept the rest of their business and the brand still got what it was paying for.

Agreement, usage terms and FTC disclosure settled before a production date was set. Nothing went into the diary until the paperwork could survive legal review.

Campaign delivered on schedule with talent, brand and agency aligned on usage from the first draft of the agreement rather than the third.

No renegotiation mid-flight, which is the quiet measure of whether a deal was structured properly at the start.