The campaign hones in on key points of the NFL calendar—including international Thanksgiving, Christmas and the first Black Friday matchups—and sets the tone for the 2023 season. It also shows what marketers can achieve when they’ve spent years developing faith in one another.
“The brief was ‘Football brings people together, and we’re a stage of epic possibilities,’” said Marissa Solis, the NFL’s svp of global brand and consumer marketing. “Maybe it wasn’t 100% on brief, but at the end of the day, [the campaign] does bring people together.”
Making it work
The NFL has been working with 72andSunny since Ellis came aboard five years ago. Before then, Ellis had a seven-year relationship with the agency while serving as CMO of Activision.
According to Ellis, that’s established a foundation of trust in the NFL’s relationship with 72andSunny.
“We have a level of flexibility, we trust each other and we find ways to capitalize on the biggest ideas to deliver on our long-term objective of creating more fans, more avid fans, more avid multicultural fans and more younger fans,” Ellis said.
From the NFL’s side, that means trusting your creative partners with creative solutions to your issue. Cole noted that 72andSunny could’ve used a direct approach—showing families watching football and telling the world the NFL is an entertainment brand—or it could employ more abstract methods that trust the audience already knows what the NFL is suggesting. It requires both sides hearing each other out.
“[Tim] came to me and said, ‘O.K., I can see how this would work. However, the script then needs to be entertainment-grade writing’—which was his way of saying it’s not there yet,” Cole said. “And the script wasn’t there, but the idea was there, the platform was there.”
Family reunion
Over two months, the NFL’s marketers and 72andSunny hammered out the script and wrangled a cast. Starting with their NFL 100 Super Bowl ad in 2019 that wrangled 65 league stars and alums for one spot, the league and and its agency have spent each year preparing for the logistically impossible by packing as much talent as possible into their biggest ads of the year.
