How VP of Content Luka Dukich built a 30-person team, adopted creator tactics, and proved that even legacy brands have to earn every view.
There’s a line from Luka Dukich that should make every executive in every industry sit up straight.
“You don’t automatically get an audience because you’re big. You have to make good, smart, strategic content. You’re renting space. But everyone is in the same boat.”
Dukich is the Vice President of Content for the Chicago Bulls. Six championships. A globally iconic brand. One of the most recognizable logos in professional sports. And he’s telling you none of that matters on YouTube. Or TikTok. Or anywhere else attention is fought for, one scroll at a time.
On a recent episode of the Scalable Pod, Dukich sat down to break open the Bulls’ content operation. If you’re building a brand in 2026, whether it plays in the NBA, sits in a boardroom, or operates somewhere in between, this one’s worth your time.
From Three People to Thirty
When Dukich joined the Bulls in 2015 as their first-ever digital content manager, the content team was three people. Today, it’s thirty. That makes it the largest individual internal team in the organization.
That growth didn’t happen because someone thought social media was fun. It happened because the Bulls recognized something early: the screen in someone’s pocket reaches more people than a packed United Center. Every one of those impressions is a moment someone chooses to spend time with the brand, whether they watched the game or not.
The content operation isn’t a supplement to the on-court product. It’s a parallel engine with its own strategy, its own audience, and increasingly, its own revenue.
YouTube Is Its Own Business Now
The sharpest strategic shift Dukich described is the Bulls’ approach to YouTube. Not as another social channel. As a fundamentally different medium that requires its own workstream.
When someone pulls up YouTube on their TV, they have the full screen and their full attention. That’s a different animal than a six-second TikTok on a bus. YouTube needs its own focus, almost a separate business entirely from other social platforms.
This year marked a milestone: more people watched Bulls content on YouTube through their television screens than on mobile. That’s not an incremental shift. It’s a category change. When your content is competing with Netflix and ESPN for the big screen in someone’s living room, the production quality, pacing, and storytelling have to meet that moment.
The Bulls responded by rethinking their KPIs. Watch time over impressions. Depth of engagement over reach. The metric that matters is whether someone stays, not whether they glance.
The Jesser Test: Segmentation Is the New Monoculture
The most telling anecdote from the conversation was about Jesser, a basketball creator with over 37 million YouTube subscribers. The Bulls brought him in for a game as part of their first-ever creator takeover.
Dukich recalled kids in tears because they were meeting Jesser. Meanwhile, a group of 30-plus folks nearby had no idea who he was. He walked right by them. Nothing. It might be the first time in history someone can be that famous to one segment and completely invisible to another.
This isn’t a story about a YouTuber at a basketball game. It’s a story about the death of monoculture, and what that means for brands still operating as though broad awareness equals relevance. The Bulls aren’t trying to be one thing to everyone. They’re building different content experiences for different audiences, and they’re comfortable knowing that not every activation will land with every segment.
You can’t go all in one direction. You need to diversify your content offerings and where your brand shows up. But you need to do it in smart ways that feel real.
Sponsorship That Doesn’t Betray the Audience
As content teams prove their value, the sponsorship conversation changes. Dukich was direct about how the Bulls think about branded content: it works, but only if the audience’s trust stays intact.
People accept that teams will bring partners in. But it has to be done tastefully and smartly. The moment you go commercial and product-first, that’s a betrayal of the audience. And you will see it in the numbers.
The word “betrayal” is worth sitting with. It reframes sponsored content not as a creative exercise but as a trust exercise. The audience gave you their attention. What you do with it either deepens the relationship or damages it.
The MrBeast Hack the Bulls Borrowed
Here’s a tactical gem: when promoting YouTube videos on other platforms, the Bulls don’t link directly to the video. They just say “check it out on YouTube” and let people search for it. Search traffic signals the algorithm that the content is being actively sought out, which boosts organic reach far more than a direct link click.
It’s a small move borrowed from MrBeast’s playbook, and it tells you something about this team. They’re not just making content. They’re students of distribution, platform mechanics, and how algorithms actually work.
What This Means Beyond Sports
The Bulls’ story isn’t just a sports story. It’s a blueprint for any organization sitting on brand equity and wondering why that alone doesn’t translate to audience anymore.
No monoculture means no guaranteed attention. That can be scary for brands used to being the default. Legacy institutions, enterprise companies, even individual executives with impressive titles: none of it converts to eyeballs automatically. You have to earn it through content that’s strategic, platform-native, and honest about who it’s for.
Thirty people on a content team happened because the Bulls understood that content is infrastructure. The organizations willing to invest in it as such are the ones that will still have an audience five years from now.
The question for every brand leader is the same one Dukich answers every day: are you building content that earns attention, or are you still assuming the logo is enough?
The full conversation is available on the Scalable Pod YouTube channel. Neil Horowitz (Director of Strategy and Research at Greenfly) first surfaced these insights on LinkedIn. For more on how content strategy intersects with executive leadership, explore Counsel Collective.
