Tim Ellis is the CMO behind America’s annual marketing Olympics, the Super Bowl.
The NFL’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer is heading into the culmination of the league’s season when the Seattle Seahawks take on the New England Patriots at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. The NFL is heading into Super Bowl LX with the regular season on track. Ratings for regular season games increased by an average of 10% in the 2025 season.
Ellis joined the National Football League in 2018 from video game giant Activision. 2026 will be the culmination of what he calls a “take off the helmet” strategy, spotlighting soccer’s superstar players and introducing an ever-changing mix of new players and rising stars. The rebound over the past decade comes after a tough period for the league, including players caught in the headlines for crimes and the league’s insensitive response to Colin Kaepernick’s civil rights movement.
“I’ve never had a fan base this big,” Ellis told Variety.
Here, Ellis explains how and why professional football has made a conscious effort to expand its reach across the United States to include women, people of color, casual fans, and audiences around the world, increasing the sport’s value to marketers. He talked about why the league was so keen to have Bad Bunny on the halftime show and why the NFL continued to support the Puerto Rican superstar despite pushback from some quarters.
What do you think is responsible for the huge increase in viewership last season?
This combines a great product, which means the quality of our games is better and more exciting than ever before, and the hard work we’ve done over the past few years to grow our audience and connect our brand with modern youth culture. So, in relation to the matches themselves, I think the close games, the great finishes, the captivating comebacks, all of those things have excited the crowd all season. Here are some facts that may surprise you. 73 games of the season were decided by three points or less. In the 62nd game, the winning goal was decided in the final two minutes. And when you look at the competitive balance, it’s actually an unpredictable situation. In the world of sports, that’s actually a good thing. It fuels excitement.
There were three teams that won the division title after finishing last in their division the previous year. So if you’re a fan, it just gives you the knowledge, the excitement, the anticipation that you never know what’s going to happen.
Why did the NFL want to invest in expanding its fan base from avid football fans? Why was it hired by Activision in 2018?
We’ve never had a fan base this big. There are currently more than 200 million fans in this country, and three-quarters of the population are NFL fans. My mission here was to restore how the league is seen in the world. You know, especially in the United States, but increasingly in other parts of the world as well. My mantra was, how can we branch out to bring more people into the NFL and make it more human, more inclusive, and more connected to the fans? So I created a strategy I call the “take off the helmet” strategy. This was really about taking the helmets off the players, humanizing them, leaning into their passions, and showing a more open, friendlier, more caring face to the league. This allowed them to appeal to a wider audience, as well as appeal to a more casual audience, including girls and women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. It really helped us connect with those audiences and bring them in.
Was this initiative a hard sell for league officials and team owners?
I just tried to come up with a plan. This is how we need to move forward. We need to reduce the tension that fans feel between the league and the players. And we need to focus on our roots, the NFL, and start modernizing, right? So on the one hand, it humanized the league again by putting the players at the forefront and having them be the face of the league, but it also gave us an opportunity to feature what our players really value in a very emotional way. And that allowed them to be very vulnerable and open and connect with people in a completely different way.
To connect with Gen Z, we focused on what players love around entertainment, including music, fashion, and gaming. As you may have noticed, for example, we’re currently the only sports league to have a fashion editor, Kyle Smith, and he’s part of our marketing team. we introduced it. We’re doing a lot to build that. We have deep connections with all of our gaming partners, as well as many of the world’s biggest gaming creators. We partner with them and bring them in. It took years to really develop these partnerships and gain the trust of the people that really helped us connect exponentially with our fans in the U.S. and around the world. Two of them are IShowSpeed, which has over 100 million followers, and MrBeast. He’s huge now. We partnered with him early on. He created the first Super Bowl commercial using the NFL as an example. This year, our first game was streamed from Brazil and (MrBeast) covered the NFL for a day in Brazil for the first game of the year. So we did a lot with him and others and gained their trust. We gained their partnership and thanks to it we were able to see the world from a completely different perspective. It helped us connect, build relationships and connect with young people and an important casual audience.
Many have also noted the effects of flag football, with the softer format opening up the youth competition to a wider range of players. Is that true in your experience?
We value participation and want to position flag as a legitimate sport. Now, we offer flag football as well as tackle, so there is no question as to whether soccer is safe for young people to play. We worked with 32 teams to get flag football recognized as a girls’ varsity sport in high schools across the country, and we’ve made great progress in just a few years. And now that the NCAA has embraced flag football, we’re going to work with our partners to build a professional league and ultimately the 2028 Olympics. These are truly monumental changes in the way we think about football and football youth development, and will go a long way in making the game more fun and interesting for a whole new fan base.
It’s been a few years now, but what is the NFL’s net gain from the Taylor Swift effect? Female viewership was already on the rise, but wasn’t Swift’s influence like rocket fuel?
She was particularly powerful and influential with our very important demographic: girls and women ages 12 to 24. That’s about 8% of our fan base, and of course they’re a very important part of our fan base because they represent the future. And she grew that segment by about 30% in the first year. She grew 30% of our fan base versus 8%. I think she provided an opportunity for so many young women to feel safe and want to be there and enjoy the game in a really authentic way.
How else are you working to reach Gen Z and beyond?
This is a natural extension of what we’ve been doing with influencers and creators for years. And those influencers and creators include sports stars like Simone Biles, right? We added them to our marketing group, but they were photographers on the sidelines. As you may have seen, Simone, Simone and Suni Lee were actually game photographers in our marketing group. So they do all this internal access work on the side.
And then there’s Olivia Culpo, who is a very influential person. She is the wife of (San Francisco 49ers player) Christian McCaffrey. And we really lifted Hailee Steinfeld (wife of Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen) and Kylie, wife of (former NFL star player) Jason Kelce, and partnered with not only the players themselves and some of these influencers and creators, but also some influencers and creators who are wives and girlfriends of players who are really passionate about the game and want to express themselves.
Bad Bunny just won the night’s major award at the Grammy Awards. What do you expect from this year’s halftime show?
Bad Bunny’s arrival this year has already made a huge impact on a very important audience in the United States and abroad. And the impact we’ve had with Kendrick Lamar over the last year in terms of video views, interest and engagement extends far beyond the game itself and around the world. I was in London digging deep into insights into how we continue to position the NFL internationally, and they were all talking about Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny and the impact some of these decisions had. You have to be prepared to not please everyone. There’s always going to be a segment of the fan base that isn’t 100% happy with some of their choices. However, you must be willing to take risks if necessary. They must also believe in what it takes to grow their fan base and improve the NFL’s image with that all-important young audience. And what we found is that some of our more mature viewers actually love this movie. It makes the league and its image more youthful, more energetic, and more fun.
