Tim Ellis (NFL) | How the NFL Builds Culture, Not Just Fans

Hey everyone, Jim here and I've got some exciting news. The CMO podcast is now on YouTube. You can now watch our conversations, not just listen. See the expressions, the energy, and the insights that happen when we sit down with the world's top marketing leaders. Head over to YouTube and subscribe to our channel, the CMO podcast, so you never miss an episode and be part of the community. So please check it out, subscribe, and join the conversation. If you were a chief marketing officer in consumer products, I want you to think about something for a moment. You have creative that works. You have campaigns that capture attention. But somewhere between that moment and the register, the signal gets lost. You cannot see what actually drove the sale. You are making optimization decisions on inference, not truth. Well, that changed in February. 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The question is never just whether your creative is working. The question is whether your infrastructure can keep up with it. Because a brain campaign still has to travel through an ad stack through data, through decisioning, through supply, through measurement and every hop in that journey is a place where value leaks out. Most platforms solve one piece of that, a data company, a DSP, a measurement vendor. You stitch them together and pay a fragmentation tax in performance, in speed and in accountability. Infillian built something very different. Demand, supply, data, measurement and creative, connected in a single, composable platform. The highest performing opt-in attention formats via Infillian's proprietary tech in the industry. Agnostic identity resolution solutions. And now Catalina, 130 million US households of verified purchase truth, running as live signal through every campaign they execute. No black boxes, no hops, no fragmented vendor relationships to manage. The only company I know of that can take you from the first moment of attention to the final proof of action. For any vertical, on any screen, without leaving the platform, open, composable, agentic, that is Infillian. I spent years at Proctor and Gamble trying to answer that question. We had the creative, we had the reach, we had campaigns that genuinely stop people. And then we watched that value quietly disappear somewhere between the moment of engagement and the proof of the business result. That gap between attention and action is where most media budgets go to die. And most digital media platforms have been content to live inside it just a little upstream from accountability. Infillian is the company that decided to close it. They started as the original attention company, built on the idea that a consumer choosing to engage with an ad is worth more that one who ignores it. But they did not stop there. They have built the infrastructure to connect the moment of attention to the proof of action across every screen, every format, every vertical. That is not a feature that is a fundamentally different idea of what an ad platform should be. And it is the one brands have been waiting for. Learn more in the show notes. What's the first brand you remember, making impact on you as a young boy? Does anybody remember Alka Selser? Plop, Plop, Fizz? Yeah, I hope so. Like, I can't believe I ate the whole thing. Right? Like, man, seeing that guy with that huge belly, what is wife trying to sleep and him sitting over there, like staring out at the void, saying, I can't believe I ate the whole thing. God, I'll never forget that. Because it was just like, you know, understanding the value of that product and understanding like how a customer feels, right? And what it means, that to me was like, it's also funny as hell. Hi, I'm Jim Stangle. I've helped hundreds of major brands discover and activate their purpose. Because when a brand's purpose is clear, compelling and authentic, profit naturally follows. Each week, I welcome the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of your favorite brands to speak to how their job is so much more than marketing. These leaders share their inspiration and challenges along with how they try to build a full, healthy, and happy life in and out of the office. And it's that energy that reaches everyone they touch. And we're glad you're here to feel that energy and to learn from these remarkable leaders. So here we go. We're deep in the red zone of the NFL season. The playoffs are down to four teams with the Super Bowl just a few weeks away. And the NFL isn't just the most valuable sports league in the world. It's a cultural phenomenon. 95 of the top 100 TV shows last year were NFL games. And the league continues to be one of the most powerful brands in the world. My guest today is Tim Ellis, the chief marketing officer of the National Football League. And one of the most creative and culturally connected marketers working today. Since joining the league in 2018, Tim has helped reshape how the NFL shows up. More human, more inclusive. And more in touch with fans and ever before. And before the NFL, Tim led marketing and Activision Blizzard turning Call of Duty into a global blockbuster. And at Volkswagen where he created one of the most beloved Super Bowl ads of all time, the Force. Our conversation was recorded live at the A&A Masters of Marketing in Orlando, powered by TransUnion. So let's kick this one off. Here's Tim. Tim, welcome to the show. Finally, we've been trying to do this for a long time. We're doing it in Orlando at the Masters of Marketing. You're just off the stage at making a big speech. And I caught the end of it. Yeah. And I heard you talk about believing in yourself, which we'll talk about in a minute. But I just want to set the stage for our audience. I talk to a lot of great brands on the show. Big leadership brands, right? Yeah, nice. Google, Qualcomm, PNG, you name them. I'm not sure we've ever talked to someone who's overseeing as unique, distinctive, and dominant in the category brand as yours. So I am so looking forward to how that happened. Because actually 10, 12 years ago, it wasn't quite this way. There has been a lot of really interesting and positive change. And I want to go there. But first, you just made a big speech in front of 2,000 plus people. So how did it go? It went great. The audience was amazing. They were very engaged. Marketers. Yeah. I mean, I, I, when I, particularly as a big audience like that, I do my best to be very personable and to say things that perhaps they don't expect me to say and to be a bit more relaxed and open and transparent than maybe they, they would imagine that the CMO of the NFL would be. And so that usually gets some kind of going with you. And I'm just, you know, I'm very honest about things. So sure, I mean, like all of us, you have to, you have to be careful about how you come across with, with certain more complex or more sensitive issues. But on the other hand, I think that's been one of my strengths over the years is just the honesty and the work and the honesty and how I approach the work. So anyway, so it was good. I, we, and I talked about the Helmets off strategy, which is all about, you know, getting behind the players and who they are as, as people and not just athletes and what they care about. I talked about the importance of how we transcend our brand and we act as a force for good within the NFL. So we sort of have a two-pronged strategy, the, the joy of the game and then how we transcend the game as a force for good. And then we talked about the importance of our flag program, our creator program. We're doing amazing things right now with artists and with creators. We have a lot of, a lot of exciting things going on around fashion, you know, with our, with our players and with some of our partners. And then, you know, our global expansion. And that's the next big frontier for the NFL. So yeah, we're, we're dominant in the US and we're, we don't take that lightly. And it's a massive responsibility when you have that kind of position. But on the other hand, you know, we have so much upside if we can figure out how to unlock the potential of, you know, NFL football internationally. Yeah. I mean, let's go there for just a minute. Every company at one, at one point to size, they want to go global. I'm, is it PNG when we said we've got to go global. And we did and we did it aggressively. I mean, you're already starting. And it looks like it's succeeding. So where do you think it'll go? Well, listen, we're, we're right now. We're playing games in various parts around the world. And Australia next year, right? Yeah. We, so we've, we've, we've been in some Apollo, Brazil, Mexico City, been in several cities in Germany. And this year for the first time in Dublin, we've been in the UK. So we've, you know, we've been in some pretty big markets in Europe in Central South America. But we're going to go, we're going to go to Australia, you know, next year. But here's the thing, those are great catalysts for stimulating the market and getting them sort of interested in what's going on with NFL football, right? But we absolutely can't stop there because we're never going to, you know, we can't be the circus that comes to town, right? We're never going to truly grow a fandom with any kind of scale. If we don't really apply classic marketing principles and sort of really lean in and do all the things that you need to do to sort of culturally get people to think differently about you and want to engage and want to understand your game because the reality is if you grew up with football in the United States, you're probably born with a terrible towel around you. You've been immersed in the sport your whole life. You don't understand that you actually learned it. Whereas when our international audiences, they see American football and they think it's chaos. What are they doing? They keep stopping and starting. They jump together. They go, "Oh, they don't understand anything." It's a very strategic game. Understanding how to unlock the basic principles of what the game is about and how to appreciate the game is also important. We're using creators and ambassadors and we're doing all kinds of insight studies to really get behind that. It's fascinating because I'm applying classic positioning strategies and sort of insight, great development strategies that I used to do for 19 years when I worked in global marketing for other companies. Now we're in the 25-26 season. It is a crazy season. I mean, anything can happen. There are so many interesting games, so many great stories, such great drama. Now that's the NFL almost every year, but this year, like it's magnified. What's going on? I mean, you can't totally control that, but I guess you can create the conditions for it, right? Well, I will say this, the fact that we're having these close games, you know, sort of high-performing quarterbacks and running backs, the fact that a team can be in last place in their division in the next year legitimately be a candidate to go to the Super Bowl. That all that stuff is by no accident. It's not a coincidence. And I have such respect and I admire the teams we have at the NFL around football operations and Roger Gidell himself, the commissioner, because the way that they have been evolving the rules of the game and like, you know, the salary cap and everything, it's unlike any other sport where you literally are, you know, you may not have a good year, but the next year might be your year. In fact, we've even done campaigns around the draft, right? This could be our year. If we could only get that one player, that those two players, we could go all the way this year. And fans know what they believe it and they see it. They experience it, right? And so to me, I'm in awe of those guys, what they've done, it really, it comes from a place of understanding the game and wanting it to be competitive, knowing what fans love. I like the kickoff rule that we call it the dynamic kickoff rule. Nobody was returning the ball, right? So they figured out a way to insert this new kick. And guess what? There's so much more action this year than we've ever had before on kickoff returns. And that's just all great for the fans and it's great for the teams and the players. I opened up the show by saying you have a unique brand and you really do. I want to share a few stats for our audience, because you know all these, but the market cap the NFL is about 230 billion and growing. I mean, that's the size of Goldman Sachs or Toyota. 95 of the top 100 broadcasts last year in the US, Renfell games. I love this one. The NFL accounts for about 4% of sports games, but has about half of all online sports consumption. And two of the top five Super Bowl ads last year, according to USA today's ad meter, Renfell ads. Geez. It's going well. It's going well. Well, actually, we were the only as of last year. I think we were the only marketer to ever be in the top five, the ad meter three years in a row, which is multiple ads, which is kind of cool. That's right. Listen, I think that the approach that we've done by partnering with players, you know, this Helmless off strategy that I that I referred to really has enabled sort of like strong bonds and ties and relationships between the fans and the players, right? Also between very importantly, between our ambassadors of the league, right? So when I came on board, there was a lot of tension between the players and the league. And this is seven, eight years ago. This was seven, yes, seven, eight years ago. There were lots of questions around the safety of the game. There was sort of, you know, predictions by the media that the NFL was a dinosaur going away. The ratings were down. And so that was what was yeah. Yeah. No, that's a thing. It wasn't all right. So it's kind of brand. And Commissioner Gidell is very open about this now. There were some mistakes that were made in terms of how the NFL managed some of the very important protests that were going on with Colin Kaepernick and Kenny Stills and Eric Creed and many others. And so I think that it was a, you know, listen, I love the NFL. I grew up as a fan and I'm also as a marketer. I love a big stage and I love a massive challenge, right? And so for me, I remember telling my wife that when I was offered the job, like, this is either going to be the best decision I ever made or the definitely the worst, right? And I'm like, but let's do it. Let's go for it because for me, like, to go in and try to help navigate and manage the resurgence of the NFL brand was an incredible opportunity, right? And I was so excited and I knew exactly what I wanted to do the day I walked in the door. In fact, even in my interviews, I didn't pull anything back. I'm saying, like, here's what you need to do. And I just like laid it laid the whole plan out, which interestingly enough, while we've sort of deepened and broaden that strategy, the same strategy I put forth in my interview is what we're using today, right? And we're just getting now the chances to, you know, do some of the things that we couldn't have done years before. But I think, you know, understanding the game, understanding the fans' relationship with a game, understanding their passion, but then also understanding some of the more nuances and complexities around that relationship, some of the tensions that fans had with their teams and with the league, enable to address those things and to bring in more fans who had never been fans before or were very, very casual fans. Because let's face it, there's like one in four fans only show up once a year to the Superbowl. Okay? We still call them fans because they watch and they call themselves fans, right? But our opportunity is not to, you know, just talk to these very core avid fans. It's to understand the casual fans and how to bring them in and how to get them more interested and engaged with their favorite teams and players. Hi, everybody. I'm Andrea Sullivan, the CEO of Vive. And we have produced the CMO podcast with Jim Stangle for many years. And I'm sitting in his seat right now. It's so exciting. I wanted to tell you a little bit about one of our programs that's called Vive by Vayner. It's a 12 month program that's designed for C-suiteers and founders. And we want to help people to grow their businesses, but also to grow themselves. And so we bring in people from Shark Tank to talk to our founders, but we also focus on wellness. We want to make sure that people are leaning into becoming their best selves, their best and happiest selves. So if you are someone that wants to learn how to grow your business and grow yourself, check us out at Vive.co. That's v-y-v-e-dot-co. We'd love to talk to you. Let's go back to that interview that you're having or interviews you were having before you took this job in 2017-18. Yeah. You had conviction you wanted to come in and you had conviction you knew what to do. Talk about that. How did you form that? How did you convey it in the interviews without being sort of a jerk? Well, interestingly enough, I was being interviewed for, I was like, final candidate for another huge company. They were hesitating to make the final call on it. And so, once you decide, I'd been an Activision for seven years. And once you decide that you're going to move, then you want to move. Yeah, right. Right. In your brain when you say, like, it's time to go. It's time to go. Yeah. Okay, I want to go now. So I was, this other cup was a good opportunity and they had, I don't know, I think me and one or two other people. And they were kind of hesitating. I'm like, okay, I'm getting sick of this. If you're not going to make a decision, I asked the search company, what else you got? They said, "Oh, I got this NFL thing." I'm like, wait, what do you mean NFL thing? What? Why didn't we talk about this before? Why didn't you tell me this was like, they said, "Well, it's a CMO of the NFL." I'm like, holy crap. Do you have a job description? You know what I like? I look at the job description. I'm like, "Are you crazy? This is me. Like this is exactly my background." And I love the NFL. Like, why didn't you tell me about this? So I immediately told the search executive who was in charge of the search. I'm like, this is what you say about me, right? Here's, let me position myself for you. And he went there and he goes, "Oh, they really want to talk to you." I'm like, "Yes, yes." And so anyway, so like, listen, all my experiences around understanding how to like attract youth, engage youth and at Activision, my experience around how to build big brands and how to manage brands at Volkswagen and Volvo. Those were all very meaningful to them. Also, interestingly enough, knowing how to work with constituents like in partners like the studios and the car dealers and big retailer companies with the automotive industry, those were important to understand how to work with owners. Because each of them have their own businesses and their own brands. And so understanding how to like bring people together and focus and work as one and focus properly on the biggest initiatives that will drive your company forward. We're very important to them as well. And then I just think, I mean, I didn't hold anything back. I mean, you have to focus on the youth 100%. you cannot worry about the 35 plus white male. You're going to have them forever. Like you have to bring in younger audiences, because I could see in the data that they year after year after year for seven years in a row, they were losing that segment. They were not working at all working, bringing in girls and women. Like, how do you do that? And like, again, repairing the tensions and earning back the respect of all of those entertainers and musicians and creators who had abandoned the NFL and didn't want to be close to them. They didn't want to be near them because they thought that the whole relationship had become toxic. And so part of that was about earning back that respect and being consistent and also talking to the commissioner and to the broader executive team about the importance of being open about mistakes, being made, being open about if I could go back and do things differently I would. And essentially saying, hey, we're committed. We're going to do things differently from here on in and then doing that. You know what I mean? Like getting behind it and doing that on a consistent basis. So anyway, so all of those things, I think they were very taken by my passion and my honesty and my logic quite frankly because everything I recommended was grounded in data and grounded in good marketing logic. And at the end of the day, you know, let's face it, creating big human high sort of performing assets and campaigns also was part of it. Like if you look at the campaigns that we have developed for the last seven years, they're not just creative and entertaining. They get you in the heart. Right? Like people today when I was walking after I spoke, like, oh my God, you made me cry. I'm like, that my own ads made me cry. Like I every time I see them, I cry. Like getting, you know, being able to do work, which, you know, 72 in Sonny, our partner in this is amazing and the way that they do that. And I asked for it, of course. I work with them. I'm very collaborative on the creative side. I get involved on the creative side of things. And so I want things which touch people which get them to feel something, which get them to think differently about it. And like not just sort of like hit them with a rational argument in the head, but they really like grab them by the heart and get them to sort of really think differently. Well, you've had creativity as a red thread in your whole career, which I think we'll probably get to in a bit. But I want you to stay with this. What in those thoughts and plans you had in your head and you conveyed in the interview when you joined? Which one was the real like aha? Is it the youth? Is it the opening arms wider? Yeah, I think that went so like listen, the first ad is amazing. So the first ad I got a chance to do was a hundred celebration of the NFL. So at that time, they had never done an ad with players that had been more than, I don't know, four or five players at a time. And we were going to do this huge celebration for the 100 year anniversary of the NFL. But I wanted to not just look backwards. I wanted to look forward as well. So yes, I wanted to sort of embrace and celebrate the past with all these amazing legends. But I also wanted to sort of point toward the future. So that added it up being sort of basically the strategy that we've continued on the entire time that I've been here. But like so when I went to the football operations team, I said, listen, I need 65 players. And they're like, wait, did you say six or five? Because that's a lot. I said, no, I said 65. And it was so audacious to ask the idea was so audacious that everyone started getting excited about it. And then I said, and I want two minutes, two minutes, like at most, they did like a minute of an ad, right? I know this is going to be awesome. And we had this great idea. And I said, we're going to start by talking to Tom Brady and Dion and we're going to get the biggest legends ever. And then people are going to be begging to be in this ad, right? Which is exactly what happened. And I say all that because then we inserted, we inserted like the premiere young woman's who was in tackle football. We put her in the ad as well at the very end. We took all of these creators and influencers from the gaming world. And we put them in like Ninja at the time who was huge at that time. We put him in the ad, right? And like the players who loved gaming, we connected them with Ninja in the ad. So we did all these things. And I say all that because it was the first time that we really put together football, youth and sort of cultural sort of magnetism, right? And by bringing all that together, it was just magic and very symbolic of your direction. Right. Completely. And it was okay. We had to say that too. It's like, it's okay if like all of the people don't know who Ninja is. Right. In fact, we even had fun with that. We had all these old guys, you know, from the dolphins from the original team, the unbeaten team like, Hey, Ninja's here. Right. So we had Jim Brown go ninjas here. Like it was really fun. And it was we realized like, okay, well, some of these guys aren't going to know who Jim Brown is, the younger people, but then it's going to create a conversation at home. Like dad's going to or mom's going to like talk about who these guys are. And the kids are going to tell them who these other, you know, young artists are and creators are. So anyway, it was just a great way to sort of bring people together in a mantra of mine. Since I joined the NFL has always been like, how do we open our arms wider, as you said earlier? And how do we bring more people in footballs for everyone? Right. So let's not worry about whether we ruffle some feathers with some of our fans. Let's not worry if we bring in certain, you know, you know, creators or certain messaging that might not be a cup cup of tea for all of our sort of older, more established fans, they're still going to be fans. And we have to be willing to make some people uncomfortable in order to bring more people in and strengthen the brand of the fan base. Now the culture of the NFL, right? Had to morph evolve. Yes. Shift to enable this to happen. So talk about that change because it feels like, you know, very different. I hate to say corporate culture, but pretty conservative. Organizational culture. Yeah. Pretty, pretty conservative. And then if you consider the owners and so forth in general, not, you know, not not everyone of course, but in general. So I think that a couple of things. One is is that really commissioner Gidele, you know, he's probably never going to listen to this podcast. So I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to please him. But he's been amazing in terms of him believing and modernizing the NFL. And he just allowed me to do the things I knew that were right. Like he wants to know the results. He wants to know what my performance indicators are. But he doesn't get involved with how I do it. He trusts me. And I've just, you know, I respect that trust. And I've done lots of, so he's gotten behind the things. I'm going to earn that trust. You know, I listen, I think that just for the first time I met him, again, when, because he was my last interview. And when again, I laid out exactly what I thought was important. And he was just nodding his head the whole time. And he's just like, it's exactly what we need to do. And so I think that when he saw it all. And then I, you know, listen, I brought the clubs along with me. So I found a way to sort of show them that we could bring all these things together, still stay true to our football roots of who we were. But to actually add on things that we weren't. And then quite frankly, I just showed him the date of how it was bringing in new fans. And how was a much more efficient, effective way to go to market. And you know, all these guys are business people, right? They saw that it might not have been what they would have done themselves. But they may not have liked everything that I was doing with my team. But they saw the results. And they saw the logic in it. They're like, okay, this is good. So I think that that reinforced, right? That reinforced many things by the same token. I was willing to do things that I knew would not be embraced by, you know, a lot of the folks who were, you know, in important positions. Let's put it that way inside the NFL. I did an ad one or two years after I can't, you know, one or two years after I started. And the first line of the ad was football as gay. And the reason I did that ad was because we had Carl NASA who came out as the first actor player to be who was gay. And I wanted to celebrate him. And so I wanted to do an ad like on the dime. And so we did an all type ad with a really cool soundtrack. And man, when I first played that ad to lots of folks inside the building, you could have heard a pin drop. Nobody knew what to say. Nobody knew how to react. A lot of the players didn't like that ad either. But guess what? One in four people in this country identify with LGBTQ plus, okay? And they were so taken by that ad and by that gesture, if you will, and by us opening our arms and speaking to them that it made a huge impression on them. It also made a huge impression amongst young people and girls and women. And it, you know, it was one I think it was one of the boldest most courageous but smartest things we ever did. And again, I tell you all that because you have to be willing to take risk. You have to be willing to fail, if you will, and to upset people in order to sort of really change the way people think and bring people in. Now a big change has been the players. The helmets off. You see more of them. You get to know them. They can beat themselves. They can celebrate. I mean, to me, that's one of the most visible changes that I remember from 10 years ago or eight years ago. So talk about that change. I mean, they are the heroes, right? They're the people who are on the teams. People come out to see and they've great stories and they're amazing people. So talk about how that shifted and how you orchestrated that well, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about the importance of trust and sort of having a vision that people can Understand and get behind I immediately went to out to the players and began to establish that level of trust and like Talk to them about the vision so I I just got the introductions to I knew who were influential players And I talked to them about you know, what do you want like how do you how do you want to build your brand? Right, what's important to you? What do you what do you have what do you burn for like what are your passions and that could be anything right could be cooking could be art could be Gaming whatever and I legitimately then tried to find opportunities for them to Connect with their own audiences through our communication, right and I did that on a consistent basis I remember I'd used You know a very successful player Deandre Hopkins You've been a league a long time and I don't know way we had done like two or three things together in the last you know a couple of years at that point And I said Deandre why do you always say yes? Why do you keep you know? I don't have say yes Why do you always say yes because Tim you make me look cool? And I'm like okay, yeah, you know, I said like okay, I key loves fashion right he loves design Right, so I got I knew the things that he loves and I did my best to find opportunities to bring him in to do that and Obviously I respect him and like him. I took the time to get to know him and you know players talk they talk to each other like you know I may not like this one, but like this guy over here. I really like him and here's why and if you can trust these guys And I think that we also started doing things like we bring together groups of players and we would have deep dives and things again that they cared about We would we would talk about how to connect on social media what are the rules for building out? You know your Your profiles and your audiences on social media how not to get caught you know by somebody who's Beginning to sort of roughly your feathers or don't get copies comes somebody's trolling you How to stop how to stop from doing that we brought in experts who could help them we let them talk to each other and help each other Right we talked about very sensitive complex subjects like social justice and how do we do that together? So bringing in old players and being open and transparent and vulnerable and you know allowing them to sort of Be honest and even vent about things was important because it built trust and so I think listen the work I remember Bobby Wagner came in he was shadowing Roger Gidell one day and we were talking about Super Bowl And should we continue to do these two minute ads? You know like is they're very expensive and so forth and Bobby was sitting there and he goes well you know the NFL now It's one of the brands that everyone looks forward to seeing what they're gonna do this year and all the players want to be in your ads because they Know they're gonna be awesome ads that'll make them look good, right? And I'm like that's pretty simple, but it was huge. I'm like thinking like thank you Bobby Thank you for coming here today and expressing that I couldn't set it better myself So I it but just meant something right because it because the you know he was Expressing something that was that was the result of a lot of work over a period of years That built up the respect and the expectations from players and I can tell you people ask me you know People think I have a dream job. I think I have a dream job people say well, what's the most you know? What's the best part of your job like it's working with the players and that's not a bullish in answer That's it like it's working with the players these guys and let's face it to get to the NFL You got to have a lot inside. Yeah, yes You have to be a great athlete and you have to have amazing strength and speed But you have to have something inside that gets you there, right? And so these these human beings are incredible. They're very very special and unique I celebrate that and I just want to make them be you know I want to I want to make them be as big as stars and as successful they have not just on the field but off the field So it is a dream job. Yeah, right people think it's a dream job. You say it's a dream job. You love it It's obviously a great match for you tell us a little bit about what you do I mean, I know it's all over the place, but kind of how do you approach the job? Where do you spend your time? Well, it's very important to that marketing people have a seat at the highest table in a company, right? So you're representing the fan you're in a market's the fan you represent your audience you're representing Things that you know will expand your business, right? So I spend a lot of my time sitting with Roger and his direct reports and talking about the business Sure, we talk about marketing, but we talk about a lot more than just marketing We talk about the business and I get I Have the opportunity that's a huge responsibility But I have the opportunity to weigh in on things that literally have nothing to do with marketing But everything to do with our business and our game, right? And I I love that part about my job And I and I'm very very thankful and respectful for the opportunity I have to influence people So that's part of my job the other part of it is I get very involved with my team Like I think one of my strengths is that I build great teams I know how to like bring in the right people how they fit together how they compliment each other I let them do their thing. I don't micromanage them I bring in people who are great at their discipline But who are also marketing athletes and I also ensure that they're they're good nice people like I don't hire any assholes And if I somehow they did I get rid of them immediately because I had definitely have a no-asshole role in my group Because I want everyone to get along and I want everyone to get along with the people who are not in marketing I want them to be the best sort of colleagues of everyone in the different, you know, groups across the NFL and on the teams, right? And so I build great teams and I spend time with my teams I I spend time with not just my direct reports, but with the VPs and with the directors and with the managers and like I sometimes I'll pick Like managers and coordinators to speak with me on panels and to do projects with me and so forth So I want to know who my teams are I also spend time with the agencies. I get very involved with the creative at Every stage of development I mean one of the most fun things we do with our biggest campaigns is I hang out with them in the editing suite And we like look at the edits and we talk and we go and then when we do the the audio I'm there together with them And we're having a great time making awesome work and to me that's one of the reasons I got into the business in the first place I think it's been a strength of mine even when I was on the agency side I used to work for goodby service scene of partners Yeah, and you know one of the reasons I was successful there was because the creative people loved me being with them Because I knew I cared about the work and I had usually some ideas which helped them right? Yeah, and then of course I'd help them sell clients, but like you know I mean I cared about the work and I wanted to get the work to a better place And I think that's why my relationship with agencies is strong and I have long tenures of agencies a lot of I think that's I'm that's a problem right now our industry a lot of their relationships are very contractual very transactional Mm-hmm And the contracts are like for one or two ads and then they go to somebody else and so forth And I understand that we all need to make sure that we contain costs and have an efficient fair Agreements with our agencies, but you can do that and still retain a good strong long-lasting relationship And I've done that and I think you know when somebody trusts you and they know that you have their best interests at heart They will find the people to work with you So if you know mean like you will do great work if as long as you have that level of trust and that level of common vision And I think that's so anyway so I so to answer your question It's a lot of time with with with Roger and his team It's a lot of time with my own team thinking about where to go and what to do and then getting engaged and involved with the creative process and that could be That could be social media that could be a big ad campaign that could be how we unleash our AI programs on data-driven programs I mean I get very involved with all those things You have a long track record of Inspiring creativity with your partners. You could back to Volkswagen, Activision, etc So you're kind of going there already, but what do you do? What's your magic in that? How do your approach that why do you have such a great track record over long period of time? I think I'm lucky Infortient because I do feel things and I trust myself. I trust my gut on things over time creative people and agencies realize that I usually have good instincts So when I say something on me like I got the clients like I've got the you know, they're like, what did he say? What did Tim say like that? So like we're thinking about together and so and again, I trust them as well Right, so I think I have good natural instincts. I'm a creative person I mean when I got out of high school. I was an actor It's a photographer for a while a writer so before I ever got into marketing I was 30 years old before I even got into marketing right so I was a creative person in heart when I was my teens and 20s And so I love the work the passion is there. I love the work. I didn't get into advertising to do shitty work I got into advertising to do work that people talked about which is why I'm so attracted to big stages Why do I want to like be able to do these massive campaigns for video games like Call of Duty? Why don't want to be on a stage where 200 million people are watching my ads or it minimum 20 million people right at the NFL It's because I love the work. I get excited about a big stage and I want the work to be awesome And I'm not afraid of like saying looking at work and say I'm not telling you that I'm right who knows if I'm right But I don't like that at all and here's why and if it's only because to me it doesn't get me then that's okay You know what I mean like I don't have to explain through a logical breakdown of why something doesn't get me in the heart It's emotional exactly and so I think that these things, I think it's the passion, the care, the instincts, and the vision for how great work actually changes brands. It drives revenue generation. It drives growth. There is a return on high creativity, which is insightful. And I think that belief and that sort of like mantra for everything that I do, has helped me be successful. You talk about your team and your great building teams. Now you have teams and 32 teams, marketing teams, some of them have CMOs. I'm not sure all of them do. I've had a few of them on the show. So that's kind of an interesting element of your job. You have your team, you have Roger and everyone, but you also have all these great organizations at 32 different places. Yeah. How do you work with them? I mean, how do you make sure that they're with you, that you're tapping into their creativity, their ideas? And that's a really, really important question. So after I got our own sort of like strategy and team in order, I immediately turned towards the 32 teams and I made it my business to understand their level of competency and their strengths and weaknesses. And I really took the time to look across all 32 teams. And then I got in front of the presidents who were in charge of the business. And I said, in terms of the quality of your team's right at that time, I said, it's uneven at best. And we have all really huge opportunities. And so I took the liberty to map out a blueprint for a local club marketing organization with a range of people in different competency areas of what you need to be successful. And yes, selling tickets and getting people into the stadiums is a big part of that. But there are lots of other things we're going to do, which is going to help you grow fans. It's going to help you monetize those fans. And it's going to help you build the value of your brand, of your, the equity around your brand and your business. And some of the presidents were like, my, who the hell is this guy telling me what I should be doing with my team? Right. You have no jurisdiction over my team. And then others were very intrigued and wanted to know more. And I spent time with him. And then guess what? Over a short period of time, they realized, again, I had their best interests at heart. I helped them build up their teams. And now I'm incredibly proud of the 32 teams. The quality of those marketing teams is amazing. Some of the best marketing teams in the sports industry are on the NFL clubs, right? I could name off a bunch of CMOs who you would know, Jim, who would like, oh, yeah, they're amazing. And that to me is incredibly important. And so, and then we work together. So we, you know, we get on the same page. Yes, they have some things which are more club oriented and I have things which are more league oriented. But we have a common vision. Flag football is a, it's a great example of that. We've really worked together to create flag. It flag drives participation, participation drives fandom and fandom drives monetization. Right? They know that. That's one of the great examples of how we've really collaborated in a, in a great way. We just did this great, we called the rivalries program, right? Which is a new alternative uniform program together with Nike, right? And it's really interesting because it was a fan development idea around uniforms because the uniforms, they talk about the history and everything. The way that they were designed and that the graphic elements and everything. It's all about the history of the team. It was all about the equity of each of the teams. Well, these guys got so involved with this project together with Nike that it's been a massive success, right? And it's just the first eight teams that we've done. It was like the biggest sales days in the history of fanatics with these things. And like the teams were ecstatic over the level of excitement and momentum they had with young people and the sales that they got. And again, that comes from working closely together with the teams with our partners at Nike and doing something that has never been done before, which turned out to be a pretty exciting success. I have, I want to talk about your career path for a moment. Then I want to go to the audience. We have a flag football player in the audience, a woman. So she may ask you a little question about that, but your career path, you went to San Diego State. I did, right? And then spent about the 11 years in advertising. It looks like most of that was in Sweden. Do I have that right? So I had four years of goodby. Okay. Right? So my whole 20s living around the world. So I lived, I worked on oil rigs in Norway and drove tractors in Israel and worked as an actor and a model in Tokyo and worked on a cruise ship as a bartender. I worked all over the world. What drove that? I had been in the theater. I didn't know if I wanted to spend the rest of my life as an actor because everybody I admired had a terrible personal life. They had broken marriages and kids all over the country and like, I love what I do. I love being an actor on the stage on the theater. But I don't want that for my life, but I don't want to do anything else. So I'm like, I'm just going to go to Paris, study, French and study literature and I'll figure it out of for a year. So I went to Paris and while I was there, I met a guy from New Zealand who said, Tim, stop agonizing. You're only like 21 years old. If you spend the next five years of your life dedicated to traveling and living around the world, you're still only going to be 26. You'll have your entire life to live a 20. I'm like, oh my God, that's the smartest thing I've heard. My life. And I said, exactly what I want to do. So what happened? That gave me the kind of alibi and I didn't worry about it. I just explored and I got into the world and learned things and experience things. Which guess what? Made me so much more interesting when I did enter the workforce because I had all this knowledge because I read voraciously as well to meet all these people. I had all these knowledge and experiences that made me a different person that made me a more expansive sort of like marketer when I got into it. So when I gave myself that time to really enjoy it and to kind of get the most out of it. So then when I did go to finally go to school at San Diego State, I sailed through. I mean, just sailed through. And my first job then I began to sort of get promoted quickly, right? But you know, after four years of goodby, I wanted to go back overseas again. So and I thought I always thought like, okay, I love doing great creative work. Man, what's it like to do creative work for like 30 countries? How do you connect with different cultures when you're not using language and all that? And actually, and I think, you know, we talk a lot about the emotional side of my work and how I connect from the heart. Well, that was like trained by connecting with people from different cultures around the world because you couldn't do work which depended upon dialogue, right? You had to do work that was based on universal themes that connected people's hearts, the stuff that like everybody can relate to, right? And some of that work we did were like winning titanium. Like I want a titanium in can. I mean, I was where I was winning grand prize. Like we were winning some of the most prestigious awards in the world. But won the titanium. Life on board for Volvo. And that ran all over Europe and that campaign was basically a simple premise that we put two people together who had never met before, but who had some commonalities. We put them in a Volvo. We drove them for two days with lipstick cameras inside. And all they had to do was talk about life which is somehow connected to a theme which is connected to a car, okay? So talk about scary and taking risks. I had no idea how that thing was going to turn out. And it turned out brilliantly the raw honesty of that. And actually, ironically, the jury of the duty that gave me the titanium, that was Jeff Goodby. And he didn't know as me. Yeah. He didn't know as my campaign because I'd gone over to Europe. And so that was kind of a satisfying, it was only the second titanium ever. The first one was BMW films. And the second titanium ever was, and it was for the most forward thinking campaign. And I was incredibly proud of that. But anyway. To me, what a great challenge to like do highly creative, highly emotive work that resonated in multiple countries and cultures. Okay, audience. Let's think of questions. All right, audience. I'm Michelle Doyle with TransUnion. In the early 80s, played Flagfoot Ball. I was only two girls in the whole league, and I really want to thank you for leaning in on the Flagfoot Ball. If you can talk about that a little bit. But my burning question, I also love live music. My whole family, we go to at least the 200 artists a year. We've got two daughters that are 23 and 21. And we've had family discussions at our dinner table. We bring up the history of the Super Bowl half-time show. And we've studied it. And we talk about it. We've been texturing it. And how do you choose that show? And does the marketing come into play with you talked about the casual fan? Do you try to use that? Or is it there's some other? It's a burning question I've always had. A hundred percent. The half-time musical show, which by the way is the biggest musical performance in the world, right? In the world. We use it as a growth driver, right? So if you look at the last six years since I joined the NFL, the musical acts have been focused on youth, right? And casual audiences, including girls and women, right? And most recently, also because we're now growing internationally, but we're really going appeal also to a a global audience as well. So we know that some of our audiences may not like everyone we put out there for the halftime show, but we do know that the people who show up at that game, who, by the way, all the data points to the biggest driver of fandom is seeing the Super Bowl first. That's how people get hooked, right? Unless you grow up with it, right? That's a pivotal point of actually seeing the Super Bowl. And at the peak of the Super Bowl of audience size is the halftime show. The audience just grows to a peak at halftime show. So we're very, very strategic and careful about the axe we pick. Now I can't take any credit for the actual artists who come on board. I have an opinion and I give my point of view on the strategy and so forth. Of course, but we have a great partner in rock nation. And obviously Roger Gidell is the ultimate decider, but like they've done a wonderful job in helping us expand our audience and bring in new people. Now, from a flag perspective, thank you for mentioning that. Flag has been, when I say footballs for everyone, this has been an incredible opportunity to like grow our audience with women. I'm very fortunate. My wife is an avid football fan. She knows more about the statistics of players than I do. She's our commissioner and our fantasy league and she kicks my ass all the time. And it really ticks me off. But she loves football, but not everyone has that knowledge and then understanding of football like she does. But man, girls and women who love football, they're such great fans. And so I knew that participation would drive fandom. So by working together on the league level, together with the 32 clubs and building a strong program. And then working with the IOC to get flag football and the LH 28 Olympics for the first time ever. That was a huge strategic initiative. And the growth of flag football today is amazing. It's undeniable. Like it's just, you know, it's growing like almost 100% in the last few years. Over 650,000 women played last year in the United States. It's incredible. So that's a really big initiative. So thank you for mentioning that about you yourself having an affinity for it. I think it's going to go do so well, the Olympics. It's going to be a huge audience. It's going to be very exciting. And they've greenlit having our pros play as well. I don't know how many will play. There's good rules around it about how many can play for team and things like that, but it's going to be really fun. Anyone else question? Hi, this is Michelle Stupkevich from Progressive Insurance. I oversee brand strategy in my own role. And I'm so curious about the transition that you've made from essentially rebranding the entire NFL image. And I know you talked a lot about all the steps that you took, but I'm so curious, where did you start when you first decided a change needed to be made? I organized the team and the competency levels of the team to focus on things that I knew would drive the most growth in the short term. You got to get wins. When you first, when you have a big job like that to come on to, you got to demonstrate and show wins. And I showed them I could do that without adding one person. Okay. So I changed the whole orientation of the team. I essentially rebuilt it, which didn't mean I hired all new people. Sometimes I just had different people, same people doing different things, but I really focused on the things that I knew would drive interest and engagement. And I purposely went with young people first because I knew I shared all the evidence. I got in front of a bunch of owners and I showed them all the data, completely transparent about where we were strong and where we were weak and culturally and with young people we were incredibly weak, right? And so then I sort of like built up our competency levels in these areas. I built up a very strong social team, an influencer team, which I had done at Activision. I knew how to do that. I brought in the right leadership in order who could drive that forward. And then I began to sort of like take traditional media money and I put it all in more engagement driven activities that were designed to exponentially reach more young people through social programs, social media programs, influencers and creators, as well as much stronger data one-to-one program, right? Who could reach and really build the relationships on a one-to-one basis with our fans and get better data and more data who we could contact because before that we were able, we had a lot of data. We couldn't contact anybody, right? So building up those programs was incredibly important. And when I got to sort of, and I began to get some early wins, then the owners and the leadership team and everybody saw it. And then I also spent a lot of time with our biggest corporate partners, right? The marketing team up before that time did not have strong relationships with the PNGs of the world, the Nike's of the world and so forth. I made it my business to understand their business and help them be more successful. So I worked very closely with our corporate sponsorship people like, you know, and then work with people like Mark Pritchard and like some of the biggest CMOs of the biggest companies in the world and help them be successful, help them get the most value out of the NFL. And so again, getting those wins early on. And then, you know, you just, if you can build that sort of exponential strength, getting the players on board, getting them to start working on their behalf, but also on your behalf right, getting working closer and unison together with your corporate partners who are also helping you build your own brand while they build their brands. It just made everything that we did. It, you know, essentially we built our touch points with fans from anywhere around a million people to close to 600 million, right? Like just by working differently, you understand? So then we basically did the math on it, right? And that, and so we were able to do that in a very efficient, effective way. And so by making those early wins and by being very open and transparent about the math behind the wins and why it was working, it just gave us more confidence internally to continue on our path. All right. Three questions to end the show. First one is, I asked this of every guest, what's the first brand you remember making impact on you as a young boy? Plop, flop, fist, yeah. I can't believe I ate the whole thing. Right? Like man, seeing that guy with that huge belly, what is wise trying to sleep and him sitting over there, like staring out at the void, saying I can't believe I ate the whole thing. God, I'll never forget that because it was just like, you know, understanding the value of that product and understanding like how, how a customer feels, right? And what it means, that to me was like, it was also funny as hell. So I love that. And then you know what? Like Coke and I'll tell you why, because I remember back in the early 70s, they did that. I'd like to give the world a coke, right? I remember exactly what the song was. Yeah, like the by the world. By the world. I just remember they were on a grassy knoll and they were all singing. It was beautiful. And I could feel the kind of the union of all those folks around the coke and it was a bigger message. So to me, it represented transcending the brand and the product itself to something bigger and greater and something that unites us all. And believe me, that's exactly how I feel about the NFL, right? I feel like it's like, yes, we're a great entertainment company. We thrill people with our product, but we're bigger than that. We are a force that unites people, that brings people together. And we try to transcend the brand and the sport in order to be a force for good. Our main stage presentation, I caught the end of it and Bob Lee had just asked you what's your message you want to leave behind. You said believe in yourself. Yeah. To the audience. So how did you develop belief in yourself? You know, you just got to be willing to put yourself out there. Again, I'll just tell a short story here. When I first joined a good, I was a coordinator. It's like the lowest to the lowest in the agency. Asperational title. Yeah. A coordinator. Like nobody expected you to do anything, but pass papers around. And I was, I remember sitting in a meeting with one of the top two creative people in the agency, very, very strong. And good be at that time. They always said it was much more difficult to bring in an account person because essentially they didn't want the account person screw things up, right? They want an account person who understood the value of the work and somebody who could actually help the work get better and help with it with their clients. And so I took that to heart, but let's face it, most of the people in my level at that point, coordinators, they were scared to death to say anything. Well, I heard this idea. I'm like, oh, I love this idea, but like there was something wrong with it. And so I said, you know, I just said it. I just said as a coordinator, I just said, well, I think that this doesn't make any sense to me. And I don't know why you didn't like, you know, and I remember everyone looked at me like, oh, shit, you were so dead. I can't believe he just said that he's out of here, you know? Like this guy is not, he's going to be here tomorrow. And Bob Kirstetter was a creative guy and who went on to form black rocket with Steve Stone. And Bob looked at me and like, he stared at me for a few seconds because it's a really good comment. And like, that was the first time that I realized, I mean, I have good instincts. You know, I mean, like I know I feel things deeply. Like I know I have good instincts. So you have to believe in yourself. You even if, even if somebody might not like it or you know, you're putting yourself at risk like that, you have to believe that what you have is a value, right? And I think that ultimately that care, that passion, that sort of forward leaning of trying to do things which really haven't been done before or things that they haven't been expressed that way before. I think is It's just important for us in advertising and marketing. We can't keep retreading and doing the same things. And quite frankly, with everyone talking about their fears around AI and all that business, I'm not afraid of AI, but you and I don't want. I want to want to shit this been done before. I don't want to keep redoing the same things over and over and over. I don't care if they've been proven to be successful before. I want to break new ground. I want to do things that haven't been done before. I want to express ourselves in ways which the world hasn't seen. So to me, if AI can help me do that, awesome. I'm all for it. But I'm not going to go back and just do something because it's been done before and because it was successful before. When I did the force, the Volkswagen ad right there, I cannot tell you how many people had the chance of Super Bowl, right? Yeah, the other chain. In fact, Time Magazine, that's where they wrote an article, the other chain just Super Bowl forever. And I cannot tell you how many CMOs and people wrote me and called me and said, like, what's the secret behind that ad and how do we like it? You cannot bottle that and do it again. It was its own magic. It's like, you can't try to rehash something. And that's one of the problems that I see sometime in the Super Bowl, right? They see something that was successful the year before and they just try to redo it again. And like, that's a big, big mistake. So this is all to say, I have instincts. I believe in myself. I believe in my instincts. I do listen. It's not that I don't listen because I do. I've changed my mind many times because of something somebody said that was compelling to me. So it's not that I don't ever change my mind. I absolutely do. But when I have conviction on something, that's what I'm doing. Yeah. Okay. Last question. Recently, it was publicly announced that you and I are being inducted into the AAF Hall of Fame in late April. So that's right. That's right. For those who don't know about, it's the biggest award in our industry. The evening is crazy. It's a lifetime achievement. It's tough to get it. I mean, it's a very rigorous process. They only do a few a year. You and I are two of the candidates. How did that make you feel when you got that call? Man, I start crying. I'm so crying now. It was so cool. You know less than 300 people in 75 years have been inducted there. So it's like, yeah, like the people you see who have done that. My God. It's amazing. So it's like, and you got to go through a lot of triggers. It's like layer. It's like, get there. Like, you got to be nominated and you got to like, who percent of you in your work? You know, the CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. And he is an amazing man. I've done a lot of work with them. I'm on their board, but I also did a lot of work with campaigns and things like that. Also them. And I'm incredibly proud. One of the things that we did together. So we not only did a Super Bowl ad, which they were prominently featured. I am somebody. But we also did at the draft. We did a special draft for mentors for Bigs. Let's use the draft to like, you know, to put a dent in that list. There are 30,000 kids on that list who need mentors. And that list had not been less than 30,000 in, he said over 10 years. I think no over 30 years maybe. It'd be forever decades. I'm like, well, we got to do something about that. So we did this really, I think, incredible program. And for the first time in all these decades, it went down a third to 21,000. Amazing, right? And so the work that we did not only resonated with people emotionally, it worked. Like it literally changed kids lives. And so I thought, okay, he was a former CMO. He understands marketing. Yes, I have a long history that he didn't work with me on. But he knew the power, I think of what I brought beyond just good work, right? And he made the case and here we are. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to celebrate that in April. I was also very touched. Yeah. And by the way, when I was PNG CMO, the first thing I had to do when I went into that big office on the top floor, which was so intimidating and so weird, they put a file on my desk is you have to submit John Smale, who is this chairman and CEO of PNG when I joined as a young guy to enter the Hall of Fame. That's my first project. Wow. So I had to prepare the application. So you would have done it. I did the video about him, you know, and. What a great way all the way around. That's so cool. It was so cool. It was so cool. So congratulations. Congratulations to you. I can't wait to see you there. See you in April, New York. Yep. It's going to be amazing. That was my conversation with Tim Ellison. It was a great one. Three takeaways from this one for your business brand and life. The first one, build great teams and let them fly. Tim believes one of his greatest strengths, if not his greatest strength, is building great teams and then trusting them to do what they do best. He hires people who are world class at their discipline, creates a culture with a strict no-asshole role, and make sure people genuinely enjoy working together. Second takeaway from this conversation. Lead with heart and believe in yourself. Tim's instinct for storytelling comes from experience. Not just in conference rooms and boardrooms, but out in the world. In his 20s, he traveled the globe, read every book he could get his hands on, took jobs across industries, and learned how to connect with people beyond language. That's where his creative compass was built. He learned that the best marketing starts from the heart and the trusting your gut is often the smartest data he'll ever have. And the third takeaway, I love this one, open your arms wider as a brand strategy. From his first day on the job, Tim set out to make the NFL for everyone. His vision for the league is bold and unapologetically inclusive. He's pushing the NFL to open its arms wider and make more people feel seen in the game. Sometimes that means making people uncomfortable, but he's okay with that if it strengthens the brand and grows the audience. Campaigns like football as gay weren't made to provoke, they were made to celebrate, to show that the NFL truly is for everyone. That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always, I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends. Along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen, the CMO Podcast is a vibe, original production. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or its personnel, nor do our sponsors advocate endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.