Apple Sports

Art directing high-impact creative for Apple's live sports portfolio — from Friday Night Baseball to Messi's MLS debut — across global digital and OOH at scale.
The challenge

Apple's expanding sports portfolio — Apple Sports, Friday Night Baseball, NFL, and MLS Season Pass — required high-impact, globally consistent creative that could scale from pre-season through finals, adapt across digital and OOH environments, and respond rapidly to culturally significant live moments. Unlike Apple Services, we weren't starting from a fully defined system. Apple provided rough creative direction: un-retouched photography, no locked layouts, no predefined spacing or margins. Part of the work was bringing structure to something that wasn't fully defined yet.



The challenge wasn't just scale. It was speed combined with constant variation. Multiple campaigns running simultaneously, each localized globally, often under tight timelines with near-zero margin for error.

The process

I built what we called key sizes, our source of truth. Layout, spacing, and hierarchy locked there first. Everything else scaled out from that, building from the hardest constraint outward. Each campaign ranged from 800 to 1,000 assets across platforms, languages, and formats.

Localization added another layer. Not just swapping headlines. Different languages fundamentally changed how layouts behaved. The goal was maintaining the intent of the original even when the variables changed. Not mechanical replacement, intentional adaptation.

Two moments illustrate what live sports creative demands at its most compressed:

When Lionel Messi signed with Inter Miami, his global fan base became the subscriber acquisition target, not just existing MLS fans. Every creative decision had to account for that distinction. Lead with Messi, lead with the emotion of watching him play, bring them into the platform through that.

Leagues Cup pushed the system harder. Under an extremely compressed timeline, the campaign was built around a single detailed illustration instead of photography. At small sizes you can't just resize, everything breaks. I directed the team to recompose, not resize, prioritizing key elements, simplifying compositions, rebuilding where needed. We also adapted the campaign into motion for Times Square.

The outcome
  • Supported campaigns across Apple Sports, Friday Night Baseball, NFL, and MLS Season Pass from pre-season through finals

  • 800-1,000 assets per campaign across multiple languages and formats, with multiple campaigns running simultaneously

  • Delivered rapid-turn creative for Messi's Inter Miami debut — the most widely viewed sporting event ever on Apple TV, with 150,000 concurrent TikTok viewers

  • Messi-dedicated social assets organically reached fans across Latin America and Spain — extending the campaign's footprint beyond North America

*Please respect the confidentiality of this project. This work was completed under NDA and is shared here using only publicly available, non-confidential materials.

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