ATLANTA – The Atlanta Area BMW Centers and the Atlanta Hawks announced a multi-year collaboration that will highlight local philanthropic agencies through a unique content series featuring Head Coach Lloyd Pierce and provide the Ultimate Driving Machine ® creators with highly-visible marketing assets inside State Farm Arena and impactful branding across the Hawks network of media platforms. Known for its unrivaled engineering, precision handling and fine touches, BMW has six local dealerships in the Greater Atlanta and Athens area.
Named head coach of the Atlanta Hawks on May 11, 2018, Pierce is regarded as one of the top young coaches in the NBA and in April 2019, Pierce was selected to the USA Basketball Men’s National Team coaching staff. This past summer, he established himself as one of the leading voices in professional sports becoming the inaugural chairman of the Coaches for Racial Justice and advocating for racial justice and education and positive societal changes.
During the pandemic, he and his wife, Melissa, started the ATL Pledge, a movement to encourage the community to come together, generate positive energy and funding for two nonprofit organizations – The Atlanta Community Food Bank and Hope Through Soap. The three-part content series, filmed by the award-winning Hawks Studios, will follow Coach Pierce as he details how he and BMW are coming together to make a difference with the two non-profits as well as their non-partisan encouragement for voting in the upcoming presidential election.
“BMW is the epitome of a high-performance, luxury vehicle and as a brand, they have shown a true commitment to positively impacting our local community which is why we are so excited about this partnership,” said Atlanta Hawks & State Farm Arena EVP & Chief Revenue Officer Andrew Saltzman.
For every BMW that is test-driven from Nov. 17 until Nov. 21, BMW will donate $20 to their choice of the Atlanta Community Food Bank or Hope thru Soap.
“The Atlanta Hawks Basketball Club’s impact on the City of Atlanta goes far beyond the court,” said Curtis Snyder, Regional Marketing Manager at BMW. “We are excited to bring this partnership to life and contribute our shared passion for performance, community, and progress”
The Atlanta Community Food Bank is the largest hunger relief organization in the Southeast, fighting food insecurity and distributing over 67 million meals to more than 700,000 people in 29 counties across metro Atlanta and north Georgia. Hope thru Soap serves the city's homeless and unsheltered through mobile outreach, delivering basic human need resources such as food, clothing and showers.
In June, the Hawks & State Farm Arena announced a partnership to transform the arena into the largest-ever voting precinct in Georgia. It began a national trend with other sports franchises following the Hawks lead and working with their local municipalities to utilize their facilities to host safe, socially distant elections.
To watch the first edition of Driving Us Forward with Coach Lloyd Pierce, click here.