For the NFL, there’s no such thing as too much – be it billions of dollars in revenue to capture, games to stretch into a schedule, prime-time TV windows to dominate and more millions of fans to bring into what’s increasingly become the only foolproof entertainment option in an increasingly cluttered landscape.
And the league’s conquer-all-frontiers mentality extends even into dunking on its most loyal sponsors on the nation’s most revered secular holiday – Super Bowl Sunday.
Two years after winning USA TODAY’s 2020 Ad Meter title with its minute-long “The 100-Year Game” spot that celebrated the league’s diamond anniversary, the NFL has returned with another two-minute epic that incorporates traditional filmmaking, emerging technology and above all, a commitment to the league’s grand plan to “future-proof” its audience.
Helmets off.
In “Bring Down the House,” the NFL will again lean heavily on personality to sell its most important assets – the game and its players – to an audience already tuning in for football.
Yet even for the mightiest global sports brand, an audience of 100 million is no reason to get complacent – not in an expand-or-die media and entertainment jungle.
“The danger of complacency is real,” Tim Ellis, the NFL’s chief marketing officer since August 2018, told USA TODAY Sports. “Since the day I stepped into the NFL, I have been ringing the bell of urgency. We cannot afford to be complacent. We have to grow our core audiences – younger fans, female fans and Latino fans. With a sense of urgency, we have to focus on that.
“The fight in the attention economy is real. I’m in charge of future-proofing the NFL and these are the fans of the future. If they don’t become fans and then become parents, they don’t bring others in.
“You can’t make a fan when they’re 34 years old.”
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Any number of metrics might indicate Ellis’ angst level is approaching Chicken Little’s. The top seven prime-time broadcasts – and 12 of the top 14 – in 2021 were NFL games, led by the 93 million who tuned in to Super Bowl 55. One hundred million unique viewers – Super Bowl-level numbers – watched last week’s conference championship games.
Annual revenues will soar past the record $16 billion set in 2019, thanks to a 17th game on the schedule and emerging media deals with behemoths like Amazon. Larger TV contracts that kick in in 2023 will raise the roof higher, sending the NFL well on the path toward commissioner Roger Goodell’s annual revenues goal of $25 billion by 2027.
Yet even as networks and streaming platforms jockey for chunks of the NFL’s inventory, the league realizes its most viable path forward goes through tying its increasingly venerated past with its future.
And that’s where computer-generated imagery, a living room, puppets, stuntmen in shoulder pads and a feverish production schedule that began in August enter the picture.
No escape
“Bring Down the House” will have A-listers in front of and behind the camera: Peyton Manning and Michael Strahan ensure provide the casual-viewing comfort food. D.K. Metcalf, Aaron Donald and Kyler Murray provide currency, while a returning slew of old heads from the 100-year game and beyond are back.
This time, a gaggle of them burst into the living room of two unsuspecting children, playing a knockoff version of Madden Football (Ellis, after all, joined the NFL from gaming giant Activision). Working again in conjunction with Los Angeles ad agency 72AndSunny, the creative team leaned on CGI and proprietary technology from New Orleans-based Swaybox, which combines puppetry and animation for feature films and television.
The spot aims to capture that any given Sunday is never typical.
“You tune in every Sunday and something crazy-unexpected and magical happens,” says Zach Hilder, executive creative director of 72andSunny. “You’re going to see this with the technology bringing these 3-D characters to life. You’ll see that in the ad – kids playing video games on Super Bowl Sunday, the boy is about to win and the football game comes out of the TV and plays out in your house.
“I have twin (8-year-old) boys and they are always playing football on the couch, acting out crazy plays, pretending they are Deebo Samuel. Everything in your house is the field of play – a banister, a table, anything.”
With Super Bowl ads going for $6-7 million per 30 seconds, two minutes is a significant chunk of space to occupy, even if the promotion goes directly back into the product.
And what happens once the ad is over?
Ellis doesn’t plan on letting young viewers tuning in escape (even if the child actors survived their living room invasion).
Once the commercial airs, kids can access the house in the commercial via Roblox or Snapchat – a Snap code will appear within the commercial. Roblox, an online gaming platform, attracts half of all kids ages 9 through 12 each week, Ellis says.
His gaming background has framed many of the NFL’s movements – three months after his arrival, the league partnered with Fortnite to provide skins for all 32 teams in the game’s Battle Royale mode.
Murray, the Arizona Cardinals’ dynamic quarterback, created ripples when he joined FaZeClan, one of the world’s largest gaming organizations. Ellis was “over the moon,” he said, when Murray and FaZeClan members appeared together in a Sports Illustrated cover story.
All that helps fill up the buckets the NFL prizes the most – reach on traditional and social media. The TV numbers are well-documented, but the league notes that time spent with NFL social content (including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok) is up 49% year-over-year, and 56% over pre-pandemic 2019.
Those demographics are why Ellis first mentioned FaZeClan as the celebrities he was most fired up about attending the game at L.A.’s SoFi Stadium – a staggering $5 billion complex that may attract the largest gaggle of A-listers for any big game.
Ellis says internal data indicates the NFL has for the first time surpassed the NBA in younger audience metrics.
“Just to be youthful and exciting is important,” he says. “And that’s why we’ve been leaning into fashion and gaming and music. That’s very important. Those are the things our younger generations care about. It’s allowed us to rejuvenate the NFL brand.”
The game doesn’t hurt, either.
‘High-pressure people’
Pete Berg, the veteran director of big- and small-screen Friday Night Lights, was tasked with turning animation and puppetry and drama into a coherent and compelling two minutes. A director of more than 20 film and TV shows, he relishes the art of working on the smaller scale a commercial requires.
Yet he couldn’t help pushing the envelope, even as he toiled for a brand whose expectations are rigid and substantive.
As production on the 2022 spot rolled on, his mind went from a 30-second spot to a minute. And as he left the set for a final time he asked, only half in jest, “Can we go two minutes on this?”
Done.
“That challenge is always strong, and very appealing,” Berg says of the short form commercial format. “The NFL are high-pressure clients and high-pressure people to work for because they have a very high expectation of quality. And I like that.
“There’s no compromise on work ethic. The NFL is just highly competitive in terms of how it wants to represent its brand. Despite what you read in the newspaper, there’s a really compelling entertainment element to football. When it gets it right, it’s an incredible experience, football. That’s an added pressure and component of these Super Bowl spots.”
Indeed, Berg acknowledges that the individual battles interspersed with 11-on-11 collaborations provides an “intoxicating” element of entertainment that seems capable of fighting any headwinds the league’s off-the-field woes exacerbate. As Berg spoke, Black coaches at all levels of football were nodding along with allegations made by former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores that past job interviews amounted to a sham. The rebranded Washington Commanders were getting roasted on Capitol Hill for owner Dan Snyder’s fostering of a toxic and abusive culture within the organization.
It’s been 11 years since an enormous class-action lawsuit was filed against the league, which eventually settled for $765 million, to the dissatisfaction of many plaintiffs whose post-playing lives were impacted by concussions suffered on the field; the league and players’ association responded with on-field mitigation that can only limit the risk so much.
And yet the league will greet its largest audience ever on Feb. 13 – with eyes only for a larger percentage of eyeballs. Ellis has little doubt the largest impression may be made during their commercial.
“We’re confident that when the world sees this,” he says, “they will be blown away.”
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