Awareness is one component of marketing. The utmost goal is the achievement of a strategic goal. I would guess in this arena, their goal is to gain subscriptions or clients. If the awareness that nerdwallet exists leads to the conversion of an ROI based number of clients, then it is a success. I have not done the research necessary to see who their target audience is and what kind of funnel they have set up to convert those that they make "aware". But, i'm just going to throw out there is a lot more to a marketing strategy than "Let's get noticed by a bunch or random people." That is NOT the foremost goal of marketing. In business, typically, it is to provide or direct qualified leads to a system (often times sales people, other times e-commerce or automated marketing) that will close the sale eventually leading to a profitabke transaction, which is, in a businesses case, the foremost goal of marketing.
If this was a ploy to get a BIG TIME basketball nut's atrention for large infusion of cash, that might be another rather narrowly focussed reason to do this. I look at that kind of transaction as a rather narrow field of marketing thst is 100% interested in fundraising. I doubt that was the case here.
With all thst said, let's just be careful to not confuse hype or buzz or "trying to go viral" with marketing as a whole. If the buzz doesn't cause the desired conversion, it is a losing proposition, not a win in and of itself.