‘You Can’t Make This Stuff Up’ turned a social media meme about the game of football into a cross platform campaign, with 26 unique pieces of content, including 16 hero films running across broadcast, streaming and digital - each highlighting different potential storylines for the season to come. It brought together some of the league’s biggest stars alongside a team of fictional writers and celebrity cameos in order to make viewers think the game might actually be scripted.

Fans have long theorized that the NFL is scripted - how else do you explain the unbelievable storylines? What has been sports folklore for years caught fire in early 2023 when former NFL player Arian Foster, went on a Barstool sports podcast and “admitted” that the NFL is scripted. All of a sudden, players around the League were taking to Twitter to join in on the conspiracy and share their reactions to their previous season ‘scripts’. From there, Pardon My Take, the most popular sports podcast in the world, took up the mantle, Jason and Travis Kelce confirmed it on their New Heights podcast, and TikTok conspiracy theorists ran wild. Even the NFL’s Commissioner Roger Goodell leaned into the joke. From Jan 1- Aug 1, there were already 247K mentions of a script for the upcoming season.

Kick-off isn’t just a game at the start of a season, it sets the tone for the year to come; the stronger the hype and buzz, the more momentum there is to carry fans through the season. It’s a crucial time to maximize engagement, especially with young, casual fans. This year, we decided to go all in on this audience. But to win with them, we had to infiltrate the conversations they were a part of.

To earn the viewership and fandom of a younger, casual, more online-driven audience, the NFL needed to take some risks – we had to behave in a way that was completely unexpected for the No Fun League.

We had to meet our audience where they are and have some fun ourselves. Instead of ignoring or denying the conspiracy, we decided to lean into it to drive tune in all season long. Because the truth of the matter is, football is the most unpredictable sport - you can’t make this stuff up, no matter how hard you try. Using a mockumentary style approach, we’d create an integrated campaign that harnessed the entire league ecosystem, enlisting players, household names and pop culture icons to script the 104th season.

So, we “wrote” the season’s storylines and brought the world behind the scenes, alongside this year’s visionary director Keegan-Michael Key and our players as world class actors, rather than athletes. Almost as soon as the rehearsal begins, everyone from the writers to the players and their moms start trying to get their own ideas added to the script. Romance arcs. Bengal tigers. Doinkage. The sexy Dexy. This campaign was completely unexpected for the “No Fun League”. With Patrick Mahomes, the Kelce family, and a shirtless Kirk Cousins brainstorming outrageous ideas, the NFL showed up differently for its 104th season. The league played with its mythos and moved at the speed of culture, all while proving: you can’t make this stuff up, no matter how hard you try.

For this campaign, we utilized a modern marketing playbook that activated the NFL ecosystem at scale to be unmissable in culture: across TV, OLV, and social media. Launching just before kickoff and carrying through the regular season, August 24, 2023 - October 2, 2023, we created 26 unique pieces of content, with 16 hero films, each fusing ridiculous storylines with real key moments throughout the year, such as Thanksgiving and the international games.

This campaign ran nationally in the US, achieving the cultural relevance, social conversation and increase in viewership we set out to among our young, casual audience.

‘You Can’t Make This Stuff Up’ was the most talked about NFL Kick-Off campaign in recent history, with 97.2K mentions, a 17x YoY increase in conversation and an earned reach of 1.8B - despite no paid media support, unlike previous years. It also garnered a 72% YoY increase in press coverage. Amounting to 60M earned media impressions with 169 articles across pop culture outlets commenting on how new and fresh this take was from such a long established League.

Finally, the campaign contributed to a 27% YoY increase in Kick-Off viewership to 27.5M - an increase of 6.6M. And it helped shift perceptions among young, casual fans age 13-34;

49% of them now consider NFL games “Can’t Miss” viewing. This work kicked off the NFL’s 104th season with a bang and spiked viewership among a fickle audience whose engagement is critical to the sustained growth of the NFL.

Overall, the writing for this campaign ranged from slightly far-fetched to downright ridiculous in order to show the unbelievable nature of real NFL season storylines. We crafted a variety of ‘pitches’ that were relevant to specific teams and players - from a quarterback known for his running ability wanting to replace his legs with wheels, to the entire league wanting to write the best player in the league out of the script. The campaign also included fictional script ideas for specific moments throughout the season, like one player changing his name for the Germany game or an octo-doink field goal for the holiday slate.