LeBron James is a living basketball legend, and the most famous active hooper on the face of the planet — excluding perhaps Kobe Bryant, who’s playing his final season. James recently signed an unprecedented lifetime deal with Nike (NKE), which makes sense.
But how could LeBron James be so important to Facebook Inc (FB) stock?
While LeBron’s not particularly well known for his coding skills (you can’t be the best at everything), he is showing a penchant for the media biz, and last year he launched a video diary project called “Uninterrupted.”
This year, he’s teaming with Oculus VR — Facebook stock’s internal virtual reality company — and Samsung (SSNLF) to promote an exclusive 12-minute video of King James training for battle.
That’s where FB stock comes in.
The Power of Promotion
On Christmas Day, during the Cavaliers-Warriors game, a commercial came on promoting the Samsung Gear VR, a $99.99 headset that straps on to Samsung Galaxy smartphones to become the first widely commercial, mobile, affordable virtual reality gear.
Here’s a gander of what the spot looked like, in case you missed it:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfq8hvelAJw]
FB’s Oculus software is powering the Gear VR, so Facebook has a stake in this whole virtual reality thing taking off. Even if Facebook doesn’t have a product of its own on the market yet — Oculus’ own headset won’t come out until the first quarter of 2016 — Mark Zuckerberg & Co. don’t want to see VR go the way of Alphabet‘s (GOOG, GOOGL) Google Glass.
Facebook stock desperately needs virtual reality to be cool, and LeBron goes a long way in legitimizing that right off the bat. While Oculus hasn’t done a thing for FB stock to date, it figures to be a big part of the company going forward.
Zuckerberg gushed about the longer-term prospects of virtual reality in FB’s Q3 earnings call:
“The reason we’re excited in this space is the continued progression of people getting richer and richer ways to share what’s on their mind. Ten years ago it was text, now it’s mostly visual and photos, then primarily video and we’re seeing huge growth there, but that is not the end of the line. Immersive 3D content is the obvious next thing after video.”
Facebook is also using its own massive platform to promote the new technology, and LeBron James recently put up a 360-degree video on his Facebook page teasing the new 12-minute training video.
The interactive video has 1.6 million views already.
Ultimately, it will have to be great content that draws users to virtual reality and FB’s Oculus. And getting the biggest sports star on the planet to bring us behind the scenes and into the training room ain’t a bad way to start.
As of this writing, John Divine did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. You can follow him on Twitter at @divinebizkid or email him at editor@investorplace.com.
