It wasn’t a dribble drive; it was a four-wheel drive.
The story of Mac McClung posterizing a Kia K5 in the NBA All-Star dunk contest is a case study in 21st century marketing, all the way down to the hidden decal, the secret trials and the conceptual email in December that agency 160over90 thought was a scam.
No one leaps over a Kia to dunk a basketball — at least not since Blake Griffin hurdled the front hood of a Kia Optima in 2011 — but McClung was going to take it one step further, or actually higher. He was going to reverse-dunk over the roof.
Creative minds apparently don’t all think alike. When McClung — a member of the G League Osceola Magic — was invited to try to three-peat as NBA slam dunk champion, he was over the moon about going over a car. First, he test-dunked on a sedan owned by renowned leaper Isaiah Rivera, crash landing for about 45 minutes. His dunk coach, Chuck Millan, tweaked his technique, and soon McClung was skillfully plucking the ball from a teammate’s hands in the sunroof, dunking and sticking the landing.
He had health insurance, so he checked that box. He just needed to assure the league and a car company he wouldn’t end up a bug on a windshield.
He had his agent email 160over90, Kia’s agency of record for sports sponsorships (Kia is the official vehicle partner of both the NBA and the Magic). But the email might as well have been spam.
“When we first got the email from Mac’s team, we thought it was a joke,” said Jan Bartholemew, vice president of partnerships at 160over90. “He’s jumping over the roof the car, not the hood? We were like, ‘Are they punking us? Is this real? Is this actually his agent?’”
They were shown outtakes of McClung executing the dunk over Rivera’s car. Not a scam at all. The next step was to alert the NBA and text the outtakes to Russell Wager, vice president of marketing at Kia America. They’d be supplying the car.
“So now the conversation is, which Kia?” Wager said. “Could it be one of our SUVs? And we gave them the measurements of an SUV. And, well, he didn’t say it this way, but it was, ‘He’s not thaaaat good.’ So we got the dimensions of what he’d been practicing on.”
Wager’s team ended up choosing the K5 (the latest iteration of the Kia Optima Griffin dunked over), mostly because its height of 56.9 inches and width of 73.2 was within McClung’s leaping parameters. After that, the challenge was keeping it secret.
