CeraVe is shooting big with its latest partnership. On Monday, the L’Oréal-owned skin-care brand announced its new role as the official skin and hair-care partner of the NBA.
“What we liked about the NBA is the diversity — that it’s multi-gender, multi-generational,” said Esther García, U.S. gm at CeraVe. “This allows us to reach a very engaged fandom base and to work with the different athletes, but also with different influencers to make sure that we reach a diverse audience.”
With the multi-year partnership, CeraVe will appear in physical and digital activations throughout the NBA season. That will include appearances at events related to NBA’s philanthropic division NBA Cares and in the video game franchise NBA 2K. According to Statista, women represent almost 40% of the NBA’s U.S. audience, and close to 50% of that audience is non-white.
The partnership is not CeraVe’s first time using sports to market its products. The brand worked with basketball players Anthony Davis and Paige Bueckers for its “Head of CeraVe” campaign to promote its anti-dandruff shampoo in February. But with the larger integration with the NBA, the L’Oréal-owned skin-care brand joins countless beauty brands that have thrown their hat into the sports ring in recent years.
That includes the likes of Sephora, which announced a partnership with the new Athletes Unlimited Softball League in July; Dove, which signed on as an official sponsor of the U.S. Open for the 2025 edition of the tennis grand slam; and Essie, which teamed up with the WNBA team the New York Liberty in May.
“Sports are a part of the culture, and there are important cultural moments around that,” said García. “And because health is becoming more important, everyone is paying more attention to sports. … It’s a very interesting crossover — cultural, but at the same time, your self-care.”
Unlike those partnerships, where brands are banking on sports with rising viewership or new leagues altogether, CeraVe’s new role joins it with one of the country’s most established sports entities. However, the NBA no longer possesses the cultural dominance it held during its peak in the 1990s.
The 2024-2025 NBA regular season averaged 1.53 million viewers across all U.S. television networks, a 2% decline from the previous season. Former powerhouse teams like the Chicago Bulls and Miami Heat have seen double-digit drop-offs in viewership in recent seasons.
But the league is putting its focus on emerging streaming platforms like Amazon Prime and Peacock and dropping its longtime cable partner, TNT, for the 2025-2026 season. And CeraVe is looking to insert its products into new elements of the NBA, like the Emirates NBA Cup, a tournament that began during the 2023–2024 season.
CeraVe is confident that the new partnership will build on the success of its past campaign with NBA and WNBA stars. According to the brand, February’s anti-dandruff shampoo campaign starring Anthony Davis and Paige Bueckers resulted in 97 million social media impressions and 2.5 million engagements. The campaign also helped CeraVe break into new arenas, as sports media coverage of the partnership accounted for nearly 20% of total coverage.
According to L’Oréal’s first-half of 2025 results, CeraVe’s hair-care products, which debuted in 2024, have helped the brand with “regaining traction” in the U.S. market. The conglomerate’s dermatological beauty division, which includes CeraVe, posted like-for-like growth of 3.1% in that period.
“The magic of CeraVe is that we’ve been able to do marketing that has inserted us in the conversation,” said García. “We are a very hot brand on social media because we take insights from the consumers, and we play a little bit with that. We make them part of the conversation, as well, and we have that sense of humor and that unexpected twist.”
