To help its sport grow meaningfully beyond the United States, the NFL, creative partners 72andSunny and players including Justin Jefferson and Saquon Barkley are handing off American football to the world in their latest Super Bowl ad.
The National Football League and 72andSunny have spent their yearslong partnership expanding the league’s reach and influence by embracing two ideas: A “helmets off” strategy that allowed a more personal marketing relationship between players and fans and the notion that “football is for everyone.” If Super Bowl viewers wanted to know who “everyone” was, they simply had to see who was running with the football.
Last year, the league handed the ball in its Big Game ad to champion Mexican flag football quarterback Diana Flores. Her run took her to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the epicenter of marketing at Cannes and the NFL Honors to present the first ever flag football players of the year. Oh, and it helped make flag football an Olympic sport at the 2028 games in Los Angeles.
It handed the ball to to young, diverse U.S. fans, to frontline and essential workers during the pandemic and to a generation that may know its players best through gaming. For its 100th anniversary, the NFL put the ball in high school football player Samantha Gordon’s hands.
“When we all started working with this brand, it was unclear who would football belong to: Is it the NFL, is it organizations?” said Glenn Cole, founder and chairman of 72andSunny. “We’re simply saying it belongs to anyone who plays or loves it.”
Since 2022, the NFL’s Global Markets Program has attempted to minimize the “National” in the league’s name and bring its game to the world. It’s given 21 of its teams access to 14 international markets including Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, China, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland and Ghana. It’s announced its first regular season game in Brazil for next season and a 2025 matchup in Madrid, but it selected Ghana as the setting for its latest Super Bowl spot.
“A lot of the things that we have been doing are working to drive key initiatives that make the NFL a more interesting, more relevant company and entity for the world,” said Tim Ellis, evp and CMO of the NFL. “This team has got that level of ambition: It’s not just about okay, give us a brief and let’s then express it, It’s about what do we need to do to ensure that the NFL not only stays relevant, but is a more powerful, more influential organization in this country and now globally.”
A new home field
The two-and-a-half minute epic—entitled Born to Play—aired after the Apple Music Halftime Show and featured a young boy named Kwesi (which, in the Kwa language of Ghana’s Akan people, translates to “born on a Sunday”) in Ghana’s capital city of Accra who dreams of playing in the NFL. His journey takes him from watching Super Bowl 58 at 2 a.m. on a laptop in his bedroom to running out of his family’s house with a football toward school the next morning as if he’s evading tacklers.
Along the way, he cuts through an open-air market in Accra, where he imagines eluding the San Francisco 49ers’ Fred Warner and lobbing a pass to the Minnesota Vikings’ Justin Jefferson. He’s chased down by the New Orleans Saints’ Cam Jordan, who upends a scooter in his pursuit, before pitching the ball to the New York Giants’ Saquon Barkley—who scoffs and sips milk from a coconut when a dog intercepts Kwesi’s toss. Filmed on a Friday and Saturday in an actual, busy market with thousands of people crowding the camera crews and vans, the benefits of the spot’s chosen setting outweighed the dearth of quiet on the set.
“It would be impossible to recreate the energy of that market and the liveliness of it, and I think it comes out in the film,” said Jason LaFlore, creative director for 72andSunny. “There’s moments even when we were filming where you’d be standing somewhere and you think it’s part of the set but, no, it’s a live vendor, you’re actually in someone’s way, someone’s trying to buy some peppers.”
Building the roster
Beyond the market, the dog leads Kwesi through a set of steel gates to NFL Africa Camp training facility, where he meets a non-imaginary two-time Super Bowl champion: British-Nigerian player and former New York Giant Osi Umenyiora. He gives Kwesi his ball and a message: “It doesn’t have to be a dream anymore: It doesn’t matter where you were born, as long as you were born to play.”
It mirrors a speech Umenyiora delivered at an actual NFL camp, but it’s a statement the league has reinforced through its International Player Pathway (IPP) Program that offers training to athletes within its global markets.
“If this was our Netflix movie, it would start with ‘Based on a true story,’” said Zach Hilder, 72andSunny’s executive creative director, who noted that the agency was inspired by Umenyiora’s work and used parts of his speeches verbatim for the ad. “We didn’t just want to make it in Ghana just because that’d be a cool place, but because of the league’s investment in the infrastructure there to take talent from different sports and put them on a fast track to the league.”
Since the program was established in 2017, 37 international players have signed with NFL teams. In 2023,18 of those athletes were on NFL rosters.
Drawing from international basketball, track, rugby, Gaelic football and Australian football, the NFL’s international development program aims to make the league a prestigious destination for global athletic talent. The program’s most recent class of athletes raised eyebrows by signing Welsh rugby star Louis Rees-Zammit away from the sport at the height of his career.
“That’s what we want to create in the world: Whether you’re a fan, whether you’re a player, we want the league to be that dream that unites and that can be that reality,” said Marissa Solis, the NFL’s svp of global brand and consumer marketing. “That’s why it’s such a special spot, and that’s why we had to get it right—It had to be authentic to the culture, it had to be authentic to the people.”
Goodbye ‘American football’
But for the NFL’s program to succeed, it can’t simply create a one-way pipeline of athletic and marketing resources for the league from its various global partners. For the NFL’s plan to work, the game it’s promoting can’t belong to the league, to the United States or anywhere else. It has to hand off American/gridiron football and let markets make their own brand of it.
While producing its Super Bowl ad in Accra, 72andSunny’s Cole said his team wanted to make use of the city’s production community while also offering them the opportunity to speak with veterans of the industry. Malik Hassan Sayeed, the ad’s director of photography from production company Little Minx, has worked with Stanley Kubrick and Hype Williams and served as Spike Lee’s cinematographer on multiple films and his commercials with Michael Jordan. The ad’s director—Andrew Dosunmu from Lagos, Nigeria—is known for his projects with Travis Scott, but transitioned from photography and music videos to features and documentaries.
Before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Dosunmu produced a book and documentary—The African Game—that looked at how various African nations, regions and people took global football (soccer) and made it their own. For the NFL spot, Dosunmu drew from his own childhood in Nigeria watching the NBA and soccer from across the globe in the middle of the night and the aspirations that came from the games and players he followed.
With the NFL and 72andSunny bringing aboard 90 local Ghanaian crew members and 400 local Ghanaian actors for the Super Bowl ad, Dosunmu noted that the league had potential to fulfill dreams beyond the playing field. During previous projects photographing and documenting people across Ghana, Dosunmu observed that the people involved all participated—that there was an an objective. In the NFL ad’s Ghanian crew, he saw a young, hip contingent that wanted to be involved in filmmaking. He noted that their work with Sayeed and his crew exposed ambition and potential similar to what the NFL was attempting to inspire in local athletes—and why the NFL’s global expansion needs to be a team effort.
“You are a depicting a culture and society, and if you don’t get locals involved you won’t understand the nuances that exist in their world,” Dosunmu told ADWEEK. “With them participating, and celebrating themselves, there is so much that emotion brings to anything beyond what you would find elsewhere. It’s the X factor that you can’t recreate.”
Tackle bullying
Continuing the NFL’s “It Takes All of Us” campaign, Pittsburgh Steelers Cameron Heyward, San Francisco 49ers George Kittle and Pro Football Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez share kids’ stories of bullying and talk about how the NFL is offering schools some help. Directed by Mohammad Gorjestani with Even/Odd, the spot pitches school districts the NFL’s Character Playbook digital course, which the league claims has tools that can help students create and maintain healthy, supportive relationships with classmates and friends. The course is funded by the NFL Foundation, in partnership with Everfi.
Mental game
Another installment of the NFL’s “It Takes All of Us,” this spot features the New York Jets’ Solomon Thomas and New York Giants’ Saquon Barkley sharing real stories of students’ mental health struggles. Steve Young, Super Bowl champion and Pro Football Hall of Famer, shows off the Character Playbook, a digital course funded by the NFL Foundation in partnership with Everfi that helps provide students with tools to be stronger and more resilient when it comes to their mental wellness.
For the latest Super Bowl 58 advertising news—who’s in, who’s out, teasers, full ads and more—check out ADWEEK’s Super Bowl 2024 Ad Tracker and the rest of our stories here. And join us on the evening of Feb. 11 for the best in-game coverage of the commercials.
CREDITS
Creative Agency: 72andSunny LA
Production: Little Minx
Editorial: Work Editorial
Color: Company 3
Sound Design/Mix: Lime Studios
Finishing: Method Studios
CLIENT – National Football League (NFL)
Chief Marketing Officer: Tim Ellis
SVP Football Communications: Tracy Perlman
SVP Global Brand and Consumer Marketing: Marissa Solis
SVP Social, Influencer, and Content Marketing: Ian Trombetta
VP Marketing: Rhett Nichols
VP Content Marketing: Tony Isetta
Director, Marketing: Jackie Finn
Senior Producer: Lucy Hallowell
Senior Marketing Coordinator: Caroline Davis
Marketing Coordinator: Greta Ferdinand
Producer: Roisin Fitzgerald
Social Content Manager: Kylie Callura
Live Content Correspondent: Riley Clinton
EVP, Club Business, International, and League Events: Peter O’Reilly
SVP, Managing Director of International: Gerrit Meier
VP, International Marketing and Fan Development: Stephanie Hsiao
International Marketing Associate: Sunny Mehta
International Marketing Associate: Emily Weirtz
Creative Director: Paul Andraos
Manager, Live Content Correspondents: Randy Sollenberger
Senior Director, Player Relations: Laura Malfy
Manager, Player Marketing: Chris Taylor
Director, NFL Social Content: Justin Anderson
Senior Manager, Social Video Content: Erin Warwick
Director, Music Licensing: Christine Black-Reimel
VP, Club Marketing: Taryn Hutt
Manager, Club Marketing: Gabriela Beavers
Manager, Sponsorship: Matt Simon
Coordinator, Sponsorship: Jack Skinner
Senior Director, E-Commerce Consumer Products: Lyndsey Cline
AGENCY – 72andSunny LA
Partner / Creative Co:Chair: Glenn Cole
Executive Creative Director / Writer: Zach Hilder
Creative Director: Jason LaFlore
Creative Director / Writer: Matt Turnier
Director of Production: Nicole Haase
Executive Producer: Laura Ferguson
Senior Producer: Danny Nouri
Junior Producer: Shareef Achekzai
Senior Partnerships and Legal Manager: Casey Brown
Partnerships and Legal Manager: Marty Cole
Group Brand Director: Shane Chastang
Brand Director: Katie Martin
Group Strategy Director: Clare Hines
Senior Strategist: Sammy Springer
PRODUCTION – Little Minx
Founder / President: Rhea Scott
Executive Producer: Helen Hollien
Director: Andrew Dosunmu
U.S. Line Producer: Morna Ciraki
Director of Photography: Malik Hassan Sayeed
Head of Production: Elaine Behnken
Production Supervisor: Tiffany Sanchez Koh
First AC: Wayne Goring
DIT: Sulekh Suman
Additional Cam Op: Riley Clinton
SERVICE PRODUCTION CO – TD Afrique Films
Producer: Danny Damah
Producer: Tony Tagoe
Production Manager: Yaw Amponsah
Production Supervisors: Victoria Mark & DZifa Gbordzi
Production Designer: Anthony Tomety
Wardrobe Stylist: Afriyah Frimpong
First AC: Jolie Sleem, Bamie Lammeh Yesseh
DIT: Emanuel Sackey
Camera Operator: Daniel Attoh
Local BTS Video: Leslie T-Quarshie and Daniel Boateng
Local BTS Photographer: Brian-Jason Gogoe
Special Effects and Stunts: Forreal Mensah
Casting: Mawuko Kuadzi
First AD: Owusua Dacosta & Mclord Ice
Gaffer: Joel Korley
Sound Recordist: James Adofo
Joyce Arakwa (Jay Everest): Location Manager
EDITORIAL – Work Editorial (:30 Teaser, 2 min + Longform)
Editor: Biff Butler
Assistant Editor: Jennifer Losch
Sr. Producer: David Won
Head of Production: Gabrielle Page
Executive Producer: Remy Foxx
Managing Director: Marlo Baird
EDITORIAL – Work Editorial (:15 Teaser Edit)
Editor: Jennifer Losch
Sr. Producer: David Won
Head of Production: Gabrielle Page
Executive Producer: Remy Foxx
Managing Director: Marlo Baird
COLOR – Company 3
Senior Colorist: Stefan Sonnenfeld
Senior Producer, Color: Blake Rice
SOUND DESIGN / MIX – Lime Studios
Sound Design: Michael Anastasi
Sound Design Assist: Michael Baran
Audio Mixer: Jeff Malen
Audio Assist: Victoria Cortez
Producer: Cassie Underwood
Executive Producer: Susie Boyajan
FINISHING – Method Studios
Creative Director / Lead Flame: Jason Frank
Creative Director / VFX Supervisor: Cris Blyth
Short Form Senior Executive Producer: Ananda Reavis
Executive Producer: Julia Paskert
Executive Producer: Zachery Fortin
Finish Producer: Mitchell Kerby
