Digiday Cannes 2024 Video Studio: Tim Ellis

Good afternoon, I'm Jim Cooper, editor-in-chief at Digiday, and we're at the Digiday Video Studio at the Blockboard Villa, Cannes 2024, on the fourth day of the festival. And we're really lucky to have Tim Ellis, who's the chief marketing officer at the NFL, with us this morning. Tim, welcome.

Thank you. How are you doing? Good to be here.

You survived four days, congratulations.

It's been great. I got here on Sunday. It's been a really intense but really an amazing week.

Let us know what your mission was as the CMO of the NFL for Cannes 2024. What were you here to really accomplish?

Well, there's a lot of key strategic initiatives that we have as a league that were important for this particular festival. One of those is our international expansion. We have a pretty aggressive expansion right now, which is pretty exciting. We have five games coming up this next season. We have games in London, we have games in Germany, and then Sao Paulo for the first time. And next year we're going to have games in Spain, for example. There are several places around the world that we'll be expanding to. And then, of course, we're aggressively working to expand our fan base right across these markets as well. So that's part of the mission. We also, flag football is very important to us. It's helping us grow young fans. It's more inclusive than any of our other activities around the game of football. So it's a way for us to go into some of these countries and establish participation. So again, getting the word out there, talking with some of the biggest, most important companies in the world who come here to learn, is important. And like every other brand, being a strong marketing machine and having great creative that is relatable but also relevant is important to us. We have a great product, and that's terrific, but like every other brand, we have to build the brand equity of the NFL. We have to communicate effectively who we are as a brand to bring in some of the more casual fans to be more avid fans. So understanding what the world is thinking about and what's considered excellent today in marketing is important to us as well. And I pride myself on having a great team, and that extends to our agency partners. We have been able to build a team which is doing some of the best work in the industry, not just in the sports industry but overall marketing industry, and I want to keep that going.

One of my favorite interviews yesterday was with Laura Krug, who's the CMO of the Kansas City Chiefs, and they're doing all sorts of amazing stuff to become a national and international team. But as a dad of two female athlete daughters, the whole flag football thing was incredibly moving to me. What they're doing, how do you see that rolling out as a driver for female sports fans in the US and globally?

Well, I should start by saying that one of the keys to getting lifelong fans is participation. Absolutely right. It's about one in four, you're four times more likely to become a fan if you play the game. And the nice thing about flag is it's completely gender neutral. So it's a fantastic way to bring in girls and women to play the game. And we know from all of our data that if you don't get someone to be a fan by the time they're 18 years old, you're never going to get them. So there's no acquisition strategy for a 34-year-old, put it that way. So getting them to play that game, whether it's video games, Madden, or flag football, is critical. And I think it's also, families get excited about how their kids are playing flag. A lot of dads who love the game, it's a way to connect and bond with their daughters by playing flag football. Now, flag football is one of the fastest growing sports in the US, one of the fastest growing sports in the world. I think 20 million people today play flag football, and we just a few months ago got it into the 2028 Olympics.

This week, what have been the more important conversations you've had that you felt were like a light bulb going off or an epiphany moment?

Well, I can tell you, it's interesting. I've been coming to the festival here for maybe 10, 15 years. I have never seen such focus and such an impact around sports, which is kind of cool obviously for the NFL, but I think it's great for the industry as well. Live sports is still the thing that brings mass audiences together. If you just look at the NFL in the US, 93 out of the top telecasts last year were NFL games. We only have 6% of the games out there, but we have 47% of the actual engagement of fans. So live sports is really, and the NFL in particular, is in its heyday. But what they're doing here at the festival now, they're using sports to bring in big groups, and I love it because it's bringing in men and women, and it's also bringing in different countries with different types of sports, which I think is good. Obviously I'm an advocate for the NFL, but I love to see all these athletes from all these different sports coming together, inspiring people, and getting marketers to really think about the power of sports and what it can do. And to be honest, I think with the times that we're living in right now, sports is really the last big unifier. I think we live in a divided society, and having sports as a series of brands that can bring in mass audiences and unify us all together is important.

I also think it's amazing that the technologies have allowed the mountains of sports content that we all have to be redistributed to younger audiences on different platforms via gaming. How are you bringing the youngest fans on board at this point, who might not necessarily have been fans before?

That's a really important question, Jim. When I first came to the NFL, I had three key acquisition targets. I said, guys who look like me, they may be our fan base, but they're not the ones we're going to talk to. We already got them, we're going to have them, they're not going anywhere. So we got to focus on young people, girls and women, and Latinos. And we had to be laser focused and disciplined about that. Those are the three cohorts that have actually driven our growth. When I came to the NFL, the youth segment was in a seven-year decline. Even though we had big audiences, I started ringing the alarm bell of urgency, saying we all got to focus on this now. For example, one of our alt-casts last year on Toy Story, we partnered with Toy Story. It was kind of simple the way that all came together technologically, but we essentially used the chip in the shoulder and the mouthpiece that we use to understand if a player gets hurt, why, and we can improve the game, make it safer. So it was a health and safety part of our technology, and we used that to work with our partners at Disney and created a live alt-cast of the game that's animated. We set that game in Andy's bedroom with all the characters from Toy Story. It was incredible. And it was hugely successful, not just for young people but for families coming together as a unit.

This festival, as you know because you've been here for many years, me too, is always about creativity first, but there's a lot of talk about technology here, especially AI this year. How do you see the beginning of AI melding with creativity to help you advance your storytelling for the NFL?

I think that it's now going to help us bring to life art in a way that we haven't been able to do before, much quicker, much more efficient, more brilliantly at scale. We're not going to have to depend on the manual ways of creating this art. It's going to happen faster. And I think we're going to see creatively how it can bring things to life in different ways than ever before. Will it replace artists? That's the big question. How important is the idea, and can that be something that AI can get at? I think we don't know exactly right now. I'm one of the ones to say, well, let's see.

Let's wrap it there. Tim Ellis, chief marketing officer at the NFL. Tim, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Good to see you again.

Thank you.