With its new NBA partnership, CeraVe truly has skin in the game.

The brand announced a multiyear sponsorship on Oct. 6 as the NBA’s Official Skincare and Haircare Partner. Posts on CeraVe’s social channels teased the deal during the weekend prior to the official tip-off. CeraVe is also working with NBACentel, in what is the parody social account’s first-ever brand collaboration, to engage “the true NBA fandom” and get them excited about the partnership, says Jasteena Gill, VP of Marketing at CeraVe U.S.

Gill believes the NBA is the sport league that’s the most digitally engaged with their fanbase. Its Instagram account alone has 90.6 million followers, and CeraVe intends to connect with the NBA community through the league’s social accounts as well as its own.

CeraVe will further reach fans and gamers with yet-to-be-finalized activations within the NBA 2K video game and at the Emirates NBA Cup, the NBA All-Star Game and other major events. And as part of its emphasis on education, the brand will offer dermatology checkups and information at Jr. NBA clinics.

We spoke with Gill about the impetus for the partnership, CeraVe’s goals and balancing humor and expertise.

CM: How did this partnership come about? Why the NBA?

JG: It kind of started with our “Heads of CeraVe” campaign that we ran earlier this year with [NBA All-Star] Anthony Davis and [number-one WNBA draft pick] Paige Bueckers; we had them involved in our haircare launch talking about their authentic concerns when it came to hair. Anthony Davis suffers from dandruff, and he actually uses CeraVe. So we had an authentic story, an authentic connection, and we were able to leverage that connection with him to talk about our new therapeutic haircare range.

And we saw some incredible engagement. It was a great testament to how we could bring an NBA player who has an authentic skin concern — because the scalp is skin — and is an authentic CeraVe user and bring in his engaged community and then see that our CeraVe superfans and users also are very engaged with his story.

And that really got us thinking, Maybe there’s something here about these two communities and the engagement of their fans … Our mission is to bring skincare information and education to all. And we thought this was an amazing opportunity to expand the reach of our skincare education to a new audience, a very diverse audience, as well with the large reach of the NBA … and in a fun, interactive, social-first manner as well.

It also gives us an opportunity to bring both of our worlds of awareness and community activation to life. So NBA Cares will be partnering with CeraVe Care for All, the mission of which is to bring dermatology to underserved communities.

CM: Is Anthony Davis going to be involved in this campaign as well?

JG: We’re still working through our player roster, so more details to come on exactly who will be involved. But what’s most important for us is, are they authentic users, are they engaged in improving their skin health, and what are some of those skin concerns that plague them every day? And bringing those stories to light to be able to educate with the dermatologists at the center of our campaign.

CM: You’ve mentioned the diverse audience of the NBA. Who exactly would you say is CeraVe’s target market?

JG: We’re a brand for everyone, and that’s really what we’ve prided ourselves in being. With our dermatology roots we talk skin concerns first, and we’ve been able to have an incredible base of consumers who are pretty equal parts men and women but also spanning across age, demographics, diversity across ethnicities and backgrounds. It’s been an opportunity for us to further tap into those audiences with the NBA, because the NBA does speak to men, but 40% [of the audience are] women. So we’re able to tap into a larger base of the audience that already is part of the makeup of CeraVe.

CM: What would you say are the primary goals of the campaign? Is it gaining new customers, increasing awareness? And how will you be measuring its success?

JG: Our mission is to ensure that we are bringing skin education to the masses with dermatologists at the heart of our educational components. So, how can we ensure that more and more people are engaging in healthy skincare routines? That would be a great way for us to to measure the success. There’s also engagement: How are we creating engaging conversations about skincare and the NBA and CeraVe? Coming together on social platforms, that’s a key component, too. This is a social-first engaging partnership. We want to flip the script on traditional sports partnerships and be able to activate influencers and players and create this digital engaged conversation as well.

CM: Why did you opt to include NBACentel in the campaign, and what is that going to look like?

JG: If you’ve seen any of our campaigns of the past — “Heads of CeraVe,” our Super Bowl campaign with Michael Cera and even just how we engage with creators on a daily basis on social — you know we take our product and our mission very seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. And that combination is something that got us to partnering with NBACentel as well. Most importantly, as I spoke about what does success look like for us, it’s about engaging with the NBA fandom and the NBA community.

CM: How is CeraVe going to be represented in live events?

JG: One thing that we get very excited about is all the IRL experiences that we can provide our consumers. We have a lot of consumer experiential moments for the brand to interact and engage with our fans and users, and this creates a moment for us to come to life differently through the NBA.

What’s really important for us to bring to life there is integrating dermatologist expertise and bringing the derm to the people. It is something that we want to continue to do: having them have that access to dermatology right at their fingertips in person. We want to also be able to engage and have people try to start their routines and then also create some moments where players could potentially interact with superfans and the dermatologists.

CM: As you said, you take the mission seriously, but not necessarily the brand. How difficult is it to hit the right balance of humor and education?

JG: It’s definitely not a perfect recipe, and there isn’t a magic sauce to it all. But I think what’s gotten us to even take that approach is it all came from consumer insights. It’s coming from our own consumers. All of our campaigns are rooted in social listening and our consumers’ insights and trying to understand what do our consumers and users want to see more of from CeraVe.

So that humor is evolved from the tone of voice of our own consumers and how they interact with us and how they engage with us. They have always created this proximity and this engagement and this humor when they engage with us as a brand and when they engage with each other. It’s been wonderful to be able to take their insights and build them into bigger campaigns.

But of course, ultimately why they’re even connected to us in the first place is because of the derm at the heart of our products and the promise of performance that we’re able to give through being developed with dermatologists. So it’s important to us that we continue to have that promise in our products but also bring that education in an entertaining way. We call it medutainment. And how we bring that entertainment and educating together is something that we are constantly thinking about and ideating on.