Taylor Swift brought new football fans to the game, but the NFL has focused on growing its engagement with young people for the past six years. NFL CMO Tim Ellis spoke to Business Insider about the strategy at Cannes Lions 2024.
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00:00About 8% of our fan base are girls and women, 12 to 24.
00:06And that is primarily the segment of our fan base that Taylor really impacted.
00:12And that segment went up about 30%.
00:14We kicked off our season last year with a tongue-in-cheek
00:21campaign with the theme, you cannot make this stuff up.
00:28So we had a lot of fun with it.
00:30Basically, all the memes out there about how the NFL was fixed,
00:35and everything is predetermined.
00:39We just had some fun with that and went with it.
00:41And we had a table reading for the season of the NFL and
00:44demonstrated how the whole thing was completely fixed.
00:47Now, at that time, even though we had Travis Kelsey and his brother, Jason, and
00:52his mom, Donna, we had no idea that Taylor Swift was gonna come on and
00:58really truly make a great sort of example of you just can't make this stuff up.
01:03So, and funny enough, I was actually talking to Travis's mom during the shoot
01:09and having a laugh about, hey, when's your son gonna get a girlfriend, right?
01:12Like he's the most eligible bachelor in the world.
01:15And sure enough, it turned out he was the most eligible bachelor in the world.
01:19But that's one of the fun things about the game.
01:22Interestingly enough, a big part of our job in marketing
01:28is creating important partnerships with creators and influencers.
01:33And a lot of those come from the music industry.
01:36And what we try to do is we try to give them experiences that money can't buy.
01:40And so they can then take that content and take those experiences and
01:43share them in an authentic way in the right platforms for them with their fans.
01:49And so even though we didn't plan or set up or anything with Taylor,
01:53the fact that she came on and basically created all this attention and
01:57all this buzz, and all this sort of really fun
02:02sort of content online with her younger fans, particularly her younger female fans.
02:07That for us was a blessing, it was a real gift and we just embraced it.
02:12We had a little bit of fun with it.
02:13We tried not to play too much into it because you can only do it,
02:17you can only go so far and then it starts to irritate people.
02:20So we did our best to sort of in a very balanced way,
02:25celebrate and bring in all these new fans.
02:28I think what's important is that it's one thing to have a new group of fans who
02:32are watching the games and hoping to get a glimpse of Taylor watching Travis.
02:39But what's most important for us is to find the right ways to onboard these fans.
02:44Meaning that we have to get them involved and
02:45engaged with the actual game itself.
02:47Get them to understand the rules of the game, have them get to know more players.
02:54And if their favorite team is not gonna be the Chiefs,
02:56what is their favorite team gonna be?
02:58Because the key to long term fandom is having players who you love and
03:02then having a team that is your own and following that team.
03:05So we spend a lot of our time with these new fans really just onboarding them and
03:11getting them to be more long term fans.
03:14So getting them to stick around, basically.
03:17And if I look at the facts, I can see it in the statistics.
03:20About 8% of our fan base are girls and women 12 to 24.
03:26And that is primarily the segment of our fan base that Taylor really impacted.
03:32And that segment went up about 30%.
03:35So I can see 30% of that 8%, hey, that's a meaningful difference.
03:39So we were very thankful for that.
03:42Now I will say this too, that our female segment was the fastest growing
03:48segment of our entire fan base together with Latinos and young people in general.
03:54So we were already in growth mode.
03:57And I think that's important to note because for
04:01us to be able to turn around what really for all live sports had been a decline
04:07in the youth segment for seven years in a row.
04:09And now for the first time in seven years, we're in the growth mode.
04:13And actually we're starting to see more and
04:15more young fans than ever become a part of our family.
04:19That's exciting.
04:20So yes, love the fact that Taylor came out and
04:23gave us this great buzz and spark and some extra fans.
04:27But I do wanna say as well that this has been a part of our strategy.
04:30We have been growing those young fans for a couple of years now.
04:33We're very excited about that.
04:34They are the future of our game.
04:37And I think that ultimately, anyone who legitimately loves this game and
04:42who wants to partner with the NFL, of course, we are very happy to
04:47work with them and have them part of our ecosystem.