Kansas City Chiefs CMO, Lara Krug on how she's building “beyond the stadium”

Summary

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On Strategy Showcase

Episode: Kansas City Chiefs CMO, Lara Krug on how she's building beyond the stadium
Date: June 22, 2026
Host: Fergus O’Carroll
Guests: Lara Krug (Chiefs CMO), Brad Jones (Barclay OKRP, CCO), Chris Cardetti (Barclay OKRP, CSO)

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Overview

In this episode, host Fergus O’Carroll sits down with Kansas City Chiefs CMO Lara Krug and leaders from creative agency Barclay OKRP to explore the strategic evolution of the Chiefs brand. The conversation spans the team’s ambitions to become “the world’s favorite team,” harnessing the cultural wave generated by celebrity fandom, redefining what it means to be a “fan,” and leveraging content and partnerships—particularly in a context where traditional paid media is restricted. They also delve into innovative campaigns designed to expand fandom, with a special focus on growing the women’s and youth audience and using bold creative to push for social change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Foundation & Ambition

• Chiefs’ Recent Success and Global Vision
  • The Kansas City Chiefs have won four Super Bowls and have made over seven consecutive AFC Championships. (07:03)
  • The team is aiming beyond the traditional “America’s Team” label, seeking a global identity:

    “We don’t just want to be America’s team, we want to be the world’s team… akin to the 90s Bulls.”
    –Chris Cardetti, Barclay OKRP (17:17)

• Lara Krug’s Unique Entry and Mindset
  • Lara, coming from beauty and beverage brands (L’Oreal, Stella Artois at AB InBev), brings a fresh lens to sports marketing.
  • She was intrigued by being the first CMO in a legacy organization, seeing huge potential to push boundaries:

    “It was just a golden, really golden egg of opportunity. There was so much ambition within the organization.”
    –Lara Krug (10:17)

  • Admits not being a traditional NFL fan—allowing empathy for new-wave fans and bringing a brand-first, not just product-first approach. (13:09, 15:13)

Redefining Fandom

• Changing Notions of the Fan
  • The idea of fandom is evolving:

    “How you define a fan is no longer, ‘Did you watch the game?’”
    –Lara Krug (15:14)

  • Sports culture is culture, no longer requiring diehard knowledge:

    “You don’t have to love sports to love sports culture.” –Chris Cardetti (16:10)

  • Emphasis on allowing “bandwagon fans” and casual fans to enter, rather than shunning them (23:23)

Strategies for Global and National Growth

• International Rights and Local Roots
  • Chiefs aggressively pursued marketing rights in Germany and Mexico, two key global markets under new NFL programs. (20:44)
  • A dual focus: “If you’re going to become the world’s team, you still have to have a strong local presence.” (21:44)
• National Monetization Model
  • The path to monetization at the national/international level includes merch, events, and most importantly, content. For Kansas City (a small market), expansion comes from being a media and entertainment brand:

    “Content media, that becomes really our way of growing nationally and that becomes an opportunity for our corporate partners to want to come to us.”
    –Lara Krug (38:15–39:19)

  • Arrowhead Stadium is positioned as an events venue for non-football experiences (Taylor Swift, Beyoncé), further embedding the brand in broader pop culture. (37:06)

Cultural Impact & Leveraging Celebrity

• Taylor Swift Effect and Pop Culture
  • The Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift relationship drew a massive, majority-female fanbase, generating extraordinary earned and social media value. (00:01–03:00)
  • The Chiefs’ female viewership became the NFL’s largest, a shift embraced in strategy and creative. (33:34)

Constraints Yielding Creativity: The No Paid Media Rule

• NFL Restrictions
  • Chiefs can’t use paid media for campaigns outside Kansas City due to NFL rules, shifting the focus to social and earned actions (05:59, 28:03).
  • As a result:

    “We need something that is going to earn attention before we can even spend a cent on attention.” –Brad Jones (29:46)

  • Forces everything to be organically shareable and rooted in genuine cultural value.

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Notable Campaigns & Initiatives

“Falling for Football” — The Playoff Romcom Trailer

[29:00–32:24]

• Created a fake Hallmark-style holiday movie trailer to draw in casual and female fans during the playoffs, leveraging the surge of interest from Taylor Swift’s presence.
• The trailer was styled as a rom-com and included inside jokes for hardcore fans—distributed organically via social channels.
• The viral success led Hallmark to produce an actual movie, “Holiday Touchdown: A Chief’s Love Story” in 2024—the #1 cable movie of that year.
• Key Quote:

  “They created a rom com essentially for an NFL team. Those two things together—you think about that and it doesn’t make any sense. Which means it’s probably going to make a lot of noise and get a lot of people to tune in.”
  –Brad Jones (29:46)

Girls’ Flag Football: The Missing Flag Campaign

[46:43–53:22]

• Chiefs wanted to advocate for girls’ flag football to be sanctioned in Kansas high schools, a barrier for growing female fandom and participation.
• The creative team removed a strip from the iconic Chiefs flag, mirroring the flag used in flag football, then posted it with no explanation—sparking fan buzz and media speculation.
• The simple, earned-media-driven stunt generated awareness and conversation among decision-makers and the public alike.
• Key Quote:

  “If flag football is not sanctioned within Kansas yet, then that means that the KC Chiefs flag should have a strip missing in it.”
  –Brad Jones (52:12)

• The campaign capitalized on the Chiefs’ cultural artifacts to create social change and new fans.

Building the Youth and Global Audience

• Focus on both boys and girls—though Swift-driven buzz and flag football efforts skew female, there are distinct initiatives for young men, including activation around football participation and broader youth programming. (54:14–55:52)

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Strategic Brand Model

Chiefs as a Media & Entertainment Brand

[39:19]

• The long-term ambition:

  “Our mission is really to make our stake as an entertainment and media company that has a sports product.”
  –Lara Krug (39:19)

• Thousands of hours of original content distributed through YouTube, Instagram, et al. The in-house content team creates nearly everything (42:28–43:50).
• Social/digital engagement is now the heart of fan engagement and sponsor value.

Players as Products, Brand as Experience

[40:15–58:38]

• The brand takes care not to over-rely on celebrity players for fandom, aiming for generational, not transactional, relationships:

  “If we only make fandom through our… player, while it makes sense in the short term, those players are not going to be part of the Chiefs active roster forever.”
  –Lara Krug (57:28)

• League rules require group appearances for partners (the “Rule of Six”), ensuring the brand, not just individuals, drives fan connection.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “How you define a fan is no longer, ‘Did you watch the game?’”
  –Lara Krug (15:14)
• “You don’t have to love sports to love sports culture.”
  –Chris Cardetti (16:10)
• “We don’t just want to be America’s team, we want to be the world’s team.”
  –Chris Cardetti (17:17)
• “If flag football is not sanctioned in Kansas yet, that means that the KC Chiefs flag should have a strip missing in it.”
  –Brad Jones (52:12)
• “Our mission is really to make our stake as an entertainment and media company that has a sports product.”
  –Lara Krug (39:19)
• “We need something that is going to earn attention before we can even spend a cent on attention.”
  –Brad Jones (29:46)
• “All we have is IP… stories, content, eyeballs. We aren’t a traditional brand. Our budgets don’t look like traditional brand budgets.”
  –Lara Krug (43:48)

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Memorable Moments & Cultural Impact

• The Chiefs becoming the NFL’s largest female-fan brand (33:34).
• The “Falling for Football” trailer-turned-movie as an unprecedented leap from brand content into pop culture artifact (31:10).
• The buzz and confusion created by the missing flag campaign (52:17), demonstrating the power of simple, earned-first thinking.

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Structural Highlights & References

• 01:00–05:00: Background, Chiefs’ place in pop culture, Taylor Swift effect, NFL market rules.
• 06:26–12:34: Lara Krug’s journey, organizational ambition, challenges.
• 13:09–18:14: Defining the modern fan, partnership origins with Barclay OKRP.
• 19:04–23:32: Discussing global ambitions, internationalization approach.
• 23:56–37:06: Transitioning from sports to entertainment, monetization via content and events.
• 39:19–45:07: Brand strategy, building out content and experiences, in-house vs. agency roles.
• 46:43–53:22: Creative process for social change (flag football), earned media innovations.

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Final Takeaway

The Kansas City Chiefs, under Lara Krug, have transformed from a storied sports franchise into a dynamic cultural brand—one that transcends the gridiron through content, creativity, and savvy adaptation to both opportunity and constraint. In a media landscape where paid buys are off-limits and the audience is global, their journey offers lessons for any brand aiming to become a genuine entertainment property and cultural force.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase.

[B]

I'm Fergus O' Carroll in Chicago. Of course, World cup soccer is all the craze this month and next here in the US and everywhere in major markets around the world. And they were in Kansas City. The. The World cup is in Kansas City at Arrowhead Stadium, which is the home stadium for the Kansas City Chiefs. So while we were in Kansas City a couple of weeks ago, we took the opportunity to talk with the Kansas City chief, cmo, Lara Krug, and she came to the agency offices of Barclay OKRP during the day. And we recorded this episode with both Barclay OKRP's Chief Strategy Officer and their chief creative officer. And we sat down in the same room that would later that night be filled with the live audience for our Live from Kansas City show. So this is recorded during the daytime, so if you're watching it on YouTube, that's why the room is actually empty. What's very cool about the Kansas City Chiefs is that Lara Krug, who's been in there for a number of years, has this ambition and the team has this ambition to be the world's favorite team. Now, if you're not from the US you may not know that America's favorite team is a label that's typically applied to the. To the Dallas Cowboys. And Lara and their team have been thinking about it on more of a global stage, because certainly you can look at soccer and know that it's definitely an international sport, but why can't just American football be the same thing? Now, obviously, the league has been taking steps in that direction in the last couple of years with international games in London, in Dublin, in other places across Europe. And the goal is to expand upon that. But Kansas City is also seeing, as the Kansas City Chiefs brand, its opportunity to play a bigger role internationally. So that became a way of sort of framing this entire conversation. Now, for those of you who, I suppose everybody's familiar with this, so it's probably targeted to everybody, but the Kansas City Chiefs has won multiple Super Bowls in the last number of years. They are among the most winning franchises in terms of Super Bowls. They have Travis Kelce, they have Patrick Mahomes, they have star players, and of course, they have Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift, obviously, in the relationship with Travis Kelce, has been attending home games, and that has dramatically increased the fan base and the audience for the Kansas City Chiefs, which is now predominantly female. And in a category where, in a brand where you cannot use paid media outside of your home market, the value to that brand, from a social perspective from an earned media perspective, in terms of a leg up in popular culture, has been nothing short of extraordinary with this fairytale type romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. That becomes a huge factor when you're a CMO of a brand and how you begin to leverage that, because that may not always be the case, but it certainly gives you an enormous opportunity and an opportunity to extend your brand outside of your home market. Now, I think Lara Krug, to her credit, she has a wonderful sense of how to leverage these things and how to not only understand how to leverage the power of the players as individual product brands, because I kind of think of them as products really in her brand architecture, she has a great perspective on how she leverages that and realizes how fragile that can be. So this is a conversation about the ambition of a brand. It's about fandom, and it's about leveraging a local market brand to not only a national brand, but to an international one. And how you then deal with the issue of monetization. And then how do you define yourself categorically when the actual game of football is simply your product?

[A]

One last thing I wanted to point

[B]

out is that towards the end of the conversation, we begin to talk about what the creative team at Barclay OKRP did as part of this initiative to promote flag football for girls in the state of Kansas. I think it's Missouri, because Kansas City is in both Kansas and two different states, Kansas City and Missouri, Kansas and Missouri. It's even confusing to me. But flag football was not sanctioned in the state.

[A]

So they, being the Kansas City Chiefs,

[B]

went about trying to change that. And part of the creative expression of that that the guys are explaining, and I just wanted to make sure it was clear when you guys hear it. What they actually did is they removed a strip of material from the Kansas City Chiefs flag that was roughly the size of the same piece of material that hangs from players in flag football. So when that strip of material was apparently absent from the flag, the Kansas City Chiefs flag, it represented the fact that there was something missing in Kansas City. So that's what they're referring to when we talk about that strip of material,

[A]

the strip of material that a player

[B]

grabs in flag football, which indicates the end of the play, if they pull it off of your belt loop, that is the strip that was then missing from the Kansas City flag.

[A]

So I just wanted to point that

[B]

out in case it's not clear, because I think it's a great idea. And then keep in mind, these guys can not use paid media because Those are NFL rules. So here's my conversation with Brad Jones, Chief Creative Officer at Barclay OKRP in Kansas City, Chris Cardetti, Chief Strategy Officer of Barkley OPRP and the CMO of the Kansas City Chiefs, Laura Krug. Enjoy.

[A]

Laura, we've got to talk about this brand. I mean it is, it's got to be one of the most famous brands and one of the most amazing brands in the last 10 years, terms of a winning streak, in terms of celebrity, in terms of role. I mean, maybe it's the most popular brand in pop culture in terms of football.

[C]

I certainly hope so at this point.

[A]

So tell us about the Chiefs. Tell us about the stats bring because we have an international audience who may not know how great the Chiefs brand is. Give us some of the top line stats on what's happening.

[C]

All right, well, I will try to summarize it and my football colleagues would probably, you guys might even be able to add in as, as some diehard fans. Yeah, I mean we've been, we've won four Super Bowls and I think we're only like the seventh team to have ever done that. We have been in over seven consecutive AFC championships. The, the brand has been around since really the beginning and the, the unknowingness of the future NFL. Lamar Hunt, our founder, was really the pioneer behind the modern day NFL. He was part of the original group that really pushed the NFL to expand and to think a bit differently from, from the 60s. And the organization is, is kind of known as one of the founding, you know, fathers, if you want to say, as part of the larger all of 32. So it has been a remarkable run for many, many years before I joined the organization. And I have been lucky enough to be part of the organization now for about five years. And a lot of those last five years have been on quite a high in terms of really the globalization and you know, really the national and kind of cultural relevance that so many of these young fans now know us for.

[A]

So I'm just trying to think back.

[B]

You arrive here in which year?

[A]

2021.

[C]

2021. Yeah.

[A]

Summer of 20. Mahomes starts roughly in 2019. I think he starts as something like that.

[C]

Yeah, that's when he started become. That's when he became a starter. I think it was 17, 18, but that was. Yeah, he had been there for a couple of years. He had already won the super bowl in Miami. Kelsey had obviously been there for a couple years before that. So the team was certainly on a roll and a high and Coach Reed had been there for many years as well. So this was really.

[A]

But then the winning streak under Mahomes starts after you've gotten here.

[C]

Well, he started it in 2019 season was really when it all really came to a head. And then, yes, I was very lucky to be part of back to back Super Bowls, which was a remarkable opportunity to say the least. As a fan now, but as a marketer as well.

[A]

So you come from New York City or you grew up in Connecticut?

[C]

Yep. East Coast. Yep.

[A]

You've worked on l', Oreal, you've worked in cosmetics and beauty, you've worked at AB InBev on Stella Artois. You then get the opportunity to take the chief's spot. It seems like it's an otherworldly experience. How did you think about it?

[C]

Yeah, when we moved, my husband and I and our family moved to Kansas City in 2020, really for his career and job. And when the opportunity was presented to me, I think what was so intriguing to me about the role, there had never been a cmo, which was shocking in some ways to me, not because they didn't have one, but because of the nature of brand that already existed and just the beloved fandom. Well before the role existed.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

But also it was a challenge. I tend to gravitate towards roles that are entrepreneurial in nature, but in legacy organization, that's kind of been a pattern. At Anheuser Busch, with Stella Artois, at l', Oreal, with some of the hair care brands I worked in, started a media agency working on legacy brands like Enterprise and New Balance. And so I think the challenge of getting to do something different is always what excites me. And then really, I just kept feeling like it was just a golden, really golden egg of opportunity. There was so much ambition within the organization. With the Hunts who own the organization, with Mark Donovan, our president, they had so much ambition, which is you can't not be motivated honestly by.

[A]

Did you come up? Were you a sports fanatic coming up?

[C]

No, I wasn't. I didn't even have an NFL team growing.

[A]

So. Was there a part of it that terrified?

[C]

Absolutely.

[A]

Tell me about that.

[C]

Absolutely. Because even when you asked me, like, name all the stats and I kind of, you could probably see that, the fear in my eyes that I don't want to get it wrong because the hardcore fans and the avid fans, as you call them, are going to be yelling at me. I'm sure on this podcast that I probably got some. Some stat wrong. I think there is fear. There's fear of or nervousness of what else could I add to it? Right. It's already such a storied organization. It was already at the top in many ways. And so I think there's always a fear or nervousness of what impact can I make that would be felt by the fans and by ultimately the business. But I really felt like the reception that I had coming into the organization, and quite frankly, they were one of the first teams to really push for a cml. Like I said, it was first at the Chiefs, but even within the total NFL, I think when I joined there maybe was, I don't know, eight, nine, ten CMO positions.

[A]

About three or four of them were women.

[C]

Yep. The la, the Rams, the Dolphins, the Eagles, the Packers, many organizations that are run by women now from a CMO perspective. But I was really just enticed by, I think, what the Hunts and Mark were willing to do. And so that nervousness was overtaken by excitement.

[A]

So I've got to think, and we'll get to you guys in a minute, please. I've got to think that, as you say, they're a very famous franchise. It is probably easy for people to say, well, this shit's going to sell itself. Right. As in the form that the brand is viewed through the lens that it's currently viewed. What else you talked about ambition. What else was it that got you excited about it? Because I'm sensing that there's a bigger. Bigger ambition, bigger story.

[C]

Yeah. I think given that I didn't grow up as an NFL fan and I didn't grow up in direct sports marketing world, I think what I came in with was a very different perspective and position in terms of what we could do as a business and even as a brand. I think for a very long time, sports has been only looked at through the lens of the product, which I do think is what makes the NFL so captivating, is that the product is so good and the product is the product of football. Football, Right. The football product. The stadium product is the best. Right. And certainly at the Chiefs, we pride ourselves in being number one in terms of fan experience and the stadium, and we're the loudest stadium in the world. So we had that part of our business in a really strong place. And the team that had been there before me should have all of that credit for getting it there. I think when I started very early on, one of the things that Mark talked about was this global ambition and this belief, without necessarily saying it yet, was that the fans are changing, the perspectives need to change how we think about it. Not just as a product, but other products. How we think about it truly as a brand, a living, breathing brand, 365 days a year. That's where the excitement came in. And that's really what I saw as my opportunity was not to try to reinvent or work on what already existed, but was to really open the aperture organizationally, but as well as with fans to say, consider us as a new brand within your offering. And I think to do that, we needed to quickly understand fans more. So even when you're just asking if I was a fan growing up, the answer is no. I was. I wasn't actively watching any NFL team growing up. I wasn't actively buying much.

[A]

Nor was I.

[C]

Nor were you. But I think the definition of a fan is a pretty legacied word. I don't want to say it's outdated, but I do think the understanding of what is fandom is something that I believe we have started to do a better job at. And I would like to pride our team in trying to think differently. But I think that is the big step change that hopefully you're seeing and that you may notice now, even not being a fan is how you define a fan is no longer. Did you watch the. The game?

[A]

Yeah, let's dig into that and you guys can jump in.

[C]

Anything that was a big part of, I think, our relationship and where it started from.

[A]

Maybe we do that. Maybe we use this as a kicking off point. So I'll come back to that more because I really do want to dig into that. Maybe we'll all jump in on this. But where does the relationship with Barclay OKRP start? And then what's the ask that Lara comes in with?

[D]

Okay, so. So Laura talked about like not being a fan growing up and I think that's exactly why she's the perfect person for this role. Because if you look at culture right now, sports culture is culture, right? The tunnel fashion, who's sitting courtside or at the game, players with their own brands and own documentaries and shows. And so it just is culture. And so from a consumer perspective, you don't have to love sports to love sports culture. And you don't have to know all the stats and all the players and teams to love the spectacle of it. It's kind of transcended. And so I think the Chiefs do an amazing job of that. Laura at the head and helm of that coming on a long story tradition. And so when she came to us at Barclay okrp, I think it was for a season opener originally and in one of the first meetings, one of the most interesting things around, that ambition that she had said, I think you kind of alluded to it was we don't just want to be America's team, we want to be the world's team. And I think you had even mentioned like being akin to the 90s bulls.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

And like I'm a child of the 90s. And so, you know, George, you mean the Chicago. You didn't know that first? I was enamored by that. I'm like, well, that's pretty audacious. And Brad and I, like, we live for clients and partners with big, audacious, ambitious, unreasonable goals. So we were like all in. We were sold.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

And so then we started to work on a few projects. Laura does a great job of like a really great in house team partners and then outside creative partners, you know, as needed. We are one of them. And so I think the first idea was the. I think we did a world's largest tailgate. She talked about this stadium being the loudest stadium. It's also an amazing tailgate culture of fandom. And so we wanted to throw that for the first kickoff.

[A]

So let's dig into the beyond the current lens of football and this idea of the world's favorite team. Talk a little bit about that big nutty ambition. And not nutty in a dismissive way, but it's a big gnarly game. Pretty crazy because we're hearing about the NFL going to Europe. We're seeing more games played over there. It seems that the NFL is taking the lead on driving more international. There's no reason why football can't be like soccer, be truly international sport. How do you achieve your goal when the NFL is out there? Are they a partner in some way with it? Or how do you think about that relationship and then how are you getting to your goal?

[C]

Yeah, so the world's team, which is a nutty goal. I mean, I think we always get the numbers again, slightly wrong. I think Kansas City is like the 29th or 30th largest city, smallest city within the 32 NFL team. So just like think about that for one second. And now we have this a 30 something large like at small. So out of 32 of market.

[A]

This is only a half million people in the city, right?

[C]

Yeah, I think the total area is like 2 million if you, if you add in every suburb and metro area. But we're a very small city. So the fact that a very small city in the heart of America has a nutty, crazy ambition of Becoming the world's team. It was crazy and I think international to your question. The international program and push has been happening for a while within the NFL, but in. In when I. In 2021, right when I was joining, it was starting to really pivot to being, let's call it more of a 1, 2 priority versus maybe 5, 6, 7. And part of that shift was the league was adjusting their program where they were allowing clubs to essentially commit and bid to say, we're going to focus our time, energy and money in certain countries that we deem important and we are no longer going to just be the shield first. We're going to be fan first and be more club player first. Right. And so this is the NFL. This is the NFL.

[A]

So they're going to be less NFL,

[C]

but more they're going to position the club. They're going to allow the clubs to have more of a driver seat mentality versus just doing it club first or just doing it league first.

[A]

Right.

[C]

That happened in 21. And we were very aggressive. So we, I think we were the only club that ultimately bid on and were awarded two markets, Germany and Mexico, to have marketing and commercial rights in it. We are. That was crazy because people were also being like, who's the team that's gonna. And we were like, we're gonna just figure this out. Myself, one or two other people on our team who were critical on this. We decided to figure out how we were going to go into these markets and start building a brand, building an audience presence to get back to it. That's also where agencies really came into the conversation. To Chris's point, we had not really worked with. Not really. We had like, never worked with any creative agencies up until 21 or so. And so that was a big part of the world's team ambition was the internationalization. But I think that wasn't going to be the only way we were going to become the world's team. I always say, if you're going to become the world's team, you still have to have a strong local presence. And more than that, we needed a national presence. So it was quite ambitious to be like, let's go become the world's team. When we hadn't even really become truly, not to take away from the Cowboys at all, but a larger American national audience. And so we really.

[A]

Well, you had the hearts, you may not have had the pockets.

[C]

Right? And we definitely didn't have the frequency. We didn't have their awareness. And so to Chris's comment, one of the first Projects we talked about was kickoff. So we had just won the super bowl right in 20 after the 19 season. We were starting the season again and we said, what is a way to export out what is so known in Kansas City to a global audience? We can't have millions of people, unfortunately, come into our stadium, but how do we essentially bring the stadium experience to them? So world's largest tailgate game. The second one, which I would love these guys to talk about, was playoffs. We realized that and I'm sure we will get to the question that always gets asked. Our favorite famous friend who came into the picture. We had a massive audience and playoffs started becoming a moment of, huh? No team thinks about playoffs truly as a campaign. It's kind of a rally cry for existing fan base. But our thought was, well, how many fans are bandwagon fans right now? And rather than like shun them for being bandwagon fans, why don't we open our doors or open our mindset to inviting them?

[A]

And that was the definition of a bandwagon fan.

[C]

Well, in my mind, it was someone that didn't root for us the whole season that came around for play there

[D]

when the top just there when McGinns get.

[A]

They turned up for the finals.

[C]

But that was part of. We were having quite a few fans whether their teams had. Weren't going further or had come into our orbit. And that was now 20 end of 22, going into 23. And that's when we briefed this team on a playoffs campaign, which they might want to speak to. That really was a turning point, I think, in terms of what we did together and. And our friends at Hallmark were a big part.

[E]

Well, before we get into the work, I was just going to say, I love the mindset that you brought into it, Laura, because, you know, if you think about an NFL team, right, you think it's a sports team, but really it's a brand just like any other brand out there. But instead of having to like, push product on people to return to the shareholders, you've got fans who are.

[D]

That's.

[E]

That's their thing. They live and die for your brand. So that's like an interesting way just to think about it. But then seeing that and then saying, do we just need to be a sports team, a sports franchise? Can we be more than that? Can we play more of a role in culture? And really, that's what I think the Chiefs have done such a great job of over the last five years, has become not just a sports team. It's like a A. It's like a kingpin of culture, not just in Casey, but nationally.

[D]

You know, maybe think like even just going from a sports franchise to an entertainment franchise. I think that's where that, that playoff run. Playoff. Thinking about as a campaign, like what you can do is you can always like, what do you see when you enter the playoffs? What do the, what do the teams do? They put out just like a hype film right of on field play. And so when we got briefed by Laura and the team was like, think of this campaign that we have a bunch of casual fans from our, you know, generally both the great on field play but also our famous fan Taylor had been hanging around, first name basis Taylor Swift had been hanging around watching the games that year. And so we had a lot of casual fans. And so we couldn't just come at them with a hype film or explain the basics of football mansplaying them football, you know, no one wants to that. So we had to bring them entertainment. And so I think that's where the idea by the team was generated. And well, what if we bring this casual fandom, which was also majority female during that time of year. Time of year around the holidays. We're in Kansas City. We have a famous company here named Hallmark. We wanted to be inspired by their entertainment. So we did Falling for Football, which was a trailer for a fake film essentially about two fans in a romantic relationship before the playoffs of football. And that kind of spawned a lot. I don't know, Laura.

[C]

I feel like that ultimately was that

[A]

was that in essence, sort of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift.

[C]

It wasn't because the guy in the film was an employee. So I, I slightly.

[A]

It was. You were playing off, you were playing off of that idea of the romance.

[C]

And it. And the whole context was what's the best for us? For Chiefs fans, avid or not, the best season of the year is playoff season. It's not Christmas. It's on July 4th. It's not Valentine's Day. And then you start thinking about what is Christmas. Well, Christmas is community. Christmas is family. Christmas is we always, you know, the jolly man in the red coat who happens, who Coach Reed happens to look lovingly like and what else is Christmas is Christmas movies. And so to that point it was rather than trying to create a piece of content that at the time, and we'll go into what makes us a bit unique is our distribution strategy and our inability due to NFL rules to do traditional paid advertising against our assets, which we can certainly talk about. It makes sense it makes us have to ensure that the content that we are creating is so compelling and is so interesting that our social channels and the way the algorithms work right now that it allows people to actually see it. And so to create standard advertising or promotional assets for something like this was not going to work. No casual fan would ever see it. One, I couldn't pay them to see it because I physically can't pull put paid advertising outside of the Kansas City area. But second of all, casual, that's an NFL rule. That's an NFL rule.

[A]

No paid outside of.

[C]

Exactly. But it also meant that we would have to create something so compelling to even using the word casual fan was even probably like pushing it. Right. You had some people who I don't even know if they would consider themselves a fan. They're like, no, but I like her or I like what the Chiefs stand for. Oh, they're a Midwest team. They seem nice. Like we had to figure out the value set to reach them. And that's where yeah, falling for football came to be. And it was a two minute trailer. Hopefully everyone has seen it at this point with the, with the billions of views, I'm hoping most people will drop

[A]

it into the show.

[C]

Okay, good. If you haven't, it still makes me smile. But it was a two minute short. We made it seem like a video. We, we went out and hired Hallmark actors and we posted that piece of content.

[A]

It was co branded with Hallmark.

[C]

It was not.

[A]

It was not. Okay, so why do we refer to as Hallmark?

[C]

Well, we refer to it Hallmark because that it spurred us then actually making it into a movie following the success of the trailer. But it was, it was an ode as we say to a Hallmark Christmas film. And it ultimately got Hallmark's attention. Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention

[A]

to midfield from Hallmark and the NFL.

[C]

Derek Taylor, Kansas City Chiefs.

[E]

Holy cow.

[C]

We are finalists for the fan of the year award.

[D]

Comes a love story.

[E]

That's a real Christmas game changer. Oh yeah. I know you are.

[D]

You do?

[C]

Yeah.

[E]

The lucky Christmas hat.

[C]

We only get to the super bowl if someone in our family wears the hat on Christmas.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[C]

Do you not believe me?

[A]

I just to see some of that Christmas magic from myself.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

That's pretty good. You didn't have a hat.

[C]

No, but we were talking about it.

[E]

But what I love about that, I didn't know that rule around no paid media. I kind of wish more brands had that in a way because it makes you work harder as a creative. Right. Like what we need something that is going to earn attention before we can even spend a cent on attention. Media. Right. And so the cool thing about that was they created a rom com essentially for an NFL team. And just those two things together, you think about that doesn't make any sense. Which means it's probably going to make a lot of noise and get a lot of people to tune in and

[D]

hit that casual fan. That that was the goal. There's a lot of eyeballs. How do you get them in for life? And I think something like that. That doesn't do what the category expects for that fan though that what she likes and is into that time of year, especially mashing those two things together all with like some real fun Easter eggs for the Die Hards as well. So there's stuff for the Die Hard fans as well in there. And then ultimately resulting in, you know, Hallmark taking notice and actually turning it into a big, big movie. And I think it was.

[C]

It became. Yeah, the ultimate film that it spurred a true Hallmark film. Holiday Touchdown as Chief's Love. Love Story came out in 2024. What year are we in now? 2026. 2024. And became the number one cable movie of the entire.

[A]

And it was overtly Chiefs branded.

[C]

I mean they're walking around Holiday Touchdown, Chiefs Love Story. So it was. And it was at our stadium, all of the Chiefs. And. And it wasn't the exact trailer arc. Right. It had elements of it. It was a. It was a different story with a different script and different. Some different actors, although some same. But it was about the entertainment strategy of you already had people seeing the trailer thinking it was real. You had casual fans, you had Chiefs fans. Now you had Hallmark fans. Now you had just pop culture fans. All these fans being like, what is this thing? And then less than six months later, I think give or take a month, we then had a true Movie poster being posted saying we actually are doing this and it's a real Hallmark film. And I think that was to the point of the creative strategy, to the point of the distribution strategy, the EARN strategy. In some ways I'm sure our media teams would not love if no one had advertising dollars. But in some ways, I think removing an arm or handcuffing an arm sometimes forced enforces the creative process and the distribution process to be that much stronger.

[A]

Branded content. You can distribute like a co branded content. It can only be distributed through Hallmar Channel or. So why did that. Why were you able to do that nationally but you weren't able to. Is it just advertising? Paid advertising?

[C]

It's Exactly. It's a long, complicated answer. But that which I can tell you, we've now become deeply versed.

[A]

You've already.

[C]

You've already found a work deeply versed in. But yes, when it becomes anything that is branded content organically, we can. We can put on our social channels, which ultimately are national. Right. I just can't force an eyeball with paid dollars.

[E]

Paid dollars, yeah. But the other thing I love about that idea is that, you know, you think about a lot of marketing. It's a lot of borrowing from culture.

[B]

Yeah.

[E]

And this is the polar opposite. It's starts with the marketing idea, which then generated a real cultural artifact in a movie that people literally watched and became the most watched movie.

[A]

Well, but predated that, though, was Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. So it's. It was sort of organic. That came into something that was more branded content. Yeah, sure.

[D]

And I think writing. I think the team, or collective teams writing the, you know, Effie entry was a nice little way to end that. That, like, you know, great female viewership, majority female fan base, the largest female fan base in the NFL after all that, obviously, a lot of that was influenced by Taylor Swift, but then being able to say that, you know, the one result was it was actually made into a movie was a nice coda to the.

[A]

Let's come back to the ambition thing, because when we talked, you and I talked before, I love this sort of idea of the concentric circles. Right. There's Kansas City, people are in the stadium. And I loved your sort of provocation that was. How do you experience the brand without being in the stadium? I'm sort of paraphrasing it.

[C]

That's correct.

[A]

So you've got KC at the center, then you've got National. Outside of that, what's the revenue model for National? How do you monetize that? Is it merch sales? Is it different physical experiences? How are you thinking about how to monetize?

[C]

Yeah, to what you were saying, what we talked about. Coming to the stadium, buying a ticket and experiencing a game is the tip of our flywheel. Right. Like, that's what makes this whole thing go around. And that's why for so long.

[A]

And sponsors.

[C]

And sponsors.

[A]

But.

[C]

But really coming to the stadium, experiencing that and buying a ticket is what is our. What our core business is built on. And that is, without that, you can't even have any of these other discussions, which is why there are so many teams that are just as amazing, but where they are in the life cycle of, like, their product offering may not just be there yet.

[A]

And they haven't won three Super Bowls in the last.

[C]

Right. Again, when we have all those ingredients, quite frankly, it's our responsibility to do something with it. Otherwise you're wasting what you can't control is winning. Unfortunately, I have zero control over what the team does. Which means that from a marketing and a business perspective, we need to control what we can control. And so the game experience is the most important part. What we found is that we, we always, I always say like unless we could stop, stop and stack millions of stadiums on top of each other, we would never be able to reach.

[A]

So you're at, you're almost, you're almost at capacity. Revenue wise, you've got a full stadium.

[C]

Yeah, I mean when we look at the data that the league gives us, I think 99.9% of Kansas City metro residents are fans of the Chiefs. Like in terms of opportunity, we've essentially, I, I've defined it as people that just like, don't like sports. Is my, is my general feeling at this point. Or there must be some Bears fans who. Yeah, like that. So in terms of reach, we've, we've essentially reached everyone in Kansas City. Our focus now is certainly in the youth generation and getting that next wave, which is something else that we worked, we've been working closely, closely with Barclay on Barclay okrpn. But the next piece of it is then, okay, how do we grow that national audience? Merch is a part of it and there's revenue there. It's a unique revenue model with some of our fanatics, Aramark, some of our partners. So there's only, there's a cap if you want to say their experiences. So coming, you know, we have a massive business, Arrowhead Events where we host everything from Monster Jam to Taylor Swift concerts to Beyonce. So certainly we want to bring more products.

[A]

Tell us about that.

[C]

So we have a whole separate arm of our business that is running non football, professional football games that we are responsible for promoting and marketing as well. Great opportunity to bring new audiences.

[A]

Professional football games that are not NFL

[C]

games or we have hosted college football games at the stadium. But a majority of the business here in kc. Exactly.

[A]

Which means because it's always ridiculous that a stadium is probably empty for 13 out of the 14 days in.

[C]

Which is why the team, Arrowhead Events team run by Matt Kenny, my, my peer, they do an amazing job at finding ways to fill that stadium up with large to large scale events to weddings to corporate Christmas parties and everything in between.

[A]

We should have done the show there today.

[C]

You know, there's this little thing called, called FIFA happening here.

[A]

That's right, yeah, yeah.

[C]

Here in about two and a half weeks that we might not have been able to. That's another great example of using the stadium. But that really became the biggest opportunity to grow nationally. Whether that's national revenue, national content, national audience. It is through content. And it's why our social channels, while they're not ours, right. They're metas and youtubes. We treat them like our O and O because they are our lifeblood to our fans in terms of revenue opportunities. Right. Like we have the number one YouTube channel within the whole NFL other than the NFL themselves. That is so important for us. That means that we need to be feeding that YouTube channel content beast with not just premium high end content, which we do have, but how do we now think about that truly as a TV channel where we need to build our programming for all the other types of audiences that are coming through. So the youth audience, the millennial mom audience, the international audience. So content media, that becomes really our way of growing nationally and that becomes an opportunity for our corporate partners to want to come to us because they want that national audience and they want an audience that's not just just big, but that is really.

[A]

So you become a media company, in essence.

[C]

Exactly. And that's where ultimately our ambition of becoming a world's team is, is the internal rallying cry to think differently. But our mission is really to make our stake as a entertainment and media company that has a sports product.

[A]

Yeah, love that. So one of the interesting things to me when I was thinking about this last night, I was thinking, you know, for traditional marketing, you look at products and brand, and so the product is one thing, it's under a brand and you go to market and you hope that product performs really well for you. Arguably, your products are the players, the brand is the chiefs. What happens when the products aren't performing at their best? I mean, how do you manage for that?

[C]

Well, you can't control. I can't control anything.

[A]

No, you can. No. Yeah, but you have the opportunity to react to it strategically.

[C]

It's why understanding that we are a brand and who our fans are is so important. Because if the reason why fans are coming towards us is only for the on field performance, that is a tough business to be in. What we have to think about is how do we make sure that our business connects with our fans now and in the future and where we can meet them. Right. So the hallmark story part of that Conversation was all these casual fans have come in, right? Whether they've watched us once, whether they've never watched us because they followed us on social, whatever it may be, we now need to go to them to give them something else to kind of keep them along on this ride. Same thing goes with if we can't control what happens on the field, especially for the next generation, how do we go and reach these young fans, whether they're in Kansas City or not, who may be interested in who we are as a value or maybe interested in the sport in another way, but we haven't given them something to connect with. So I think one of the reasons, and I would love for you guys to talk about what we've just done with flag football, which is a massive initiative for us. But one of the things that I think I would love to give credit to these guys for in this agency is we only had ever done and produced everything creatively from our inside our walls. And my team is unbelievable at what they do. Both from a creative design, brand, production, social, digital, everything in between. But one of the things that I really wanted to push the team on and I think when we go and we rethink fan is like we needed an outside perspective as well. But we also needed, candidly, an agency and a partner, truly a partner that would understand that we aren't a classic client. Like we have this entire internal team who are truly experts on the brand and the culture and the legacy.

[A]

That's an internal sort of branded content team in addition to a marketing team.

[C]

Correct. We have everything, right? Yeah. And we have about, we have about 10 to 15 producers, editors, producers, photographer, talent, everything in house. 99% of what you see on one of our channels is done from our internal team from the minute they shoot it to the minute they post it.

[A]

And this is a relatively new team.

[C]

Some of them have been there for quite a while. The idea of an in house production team has existed for a long time. Most big NFL, most professional sports, sports teams do it internally just because think about access, right? Practices happening five days a week. We don't have time nor budget to have external cameras come in. It all has to be in house because of access. But what we were starting to miss as we were growing or not miss, where the opportunity was. We needed someone that was going to give us a separate perspective or an additional perspective, which I think is where this relationship has been, been so fruitful is we needed someone to come with us, but we needed a partner that understood the nuances of who we were. Our budgets are not big, which is

[A]

interesting because you would think with a franchise like the Chiefs, you would think there would be enormous allocation or at least access to a major budget. But you have a modest budget, but you've got access to talent that's already on the payroll.

[C]

All we have is ip.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

What we have is stories. What we have is content. What we have is eyeballs. We have all of those ingredients. Again, because we aren't a traditional brand. Our marketing budgets don't look like traditional brand budgets. Right.

[A]

Plus, you can't do paid media.

[B]

Correct.

[C]

So again, you're like chopping off both arms. And so I just. I think that's a really important part of this conversation was how do you find the right partner with us? And I think one, some of these guys being in Kansas City was helpful. They knew the Kansas City Chiefs uniqueness and flavor, but then they were coming at it from a creative advertising perspective. So you're talking about now needing to reach a new audience. It's a very different skill set and a very different not skill set mindset than what. What my team does every day up until this point, which was really talking to the avid fans and making sure that our massive existing audience stayed happy, stayed recruited, stayed retained, was still coming. So we needed to allocate a focus for a new pillar. How do we go now? Reach new fans. And we're going to have to think differently, execute differently, show up differently. And that's where I think these guys have played a major role in that.

[D]

Yeah. So, yeah, get this big world's team ambition. You're creating an entertainment and media franchise. Right. So no matter what the play is on the field, you have a backbone of content and eyeballs and entertainment to go out. But also, like, when there's not play, there's still the community. They call it the Chief's Kingdom. The kingdom exists 365 days a year.

[A]

Yeah. Chief's Kingdom. I like that. Yeah. Yeah.

[D]

And not me. Not going to many. I don't.

[C]

Mitch Holtis coined that, actually.

[D]

There you go.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Announcer. Yeah. So you have a community. Right. And you have to gain a new generation every generations. You don't. I mean, in all branding, you know, f. Like, you have to earn them. You don't just get a new generation of fans, buyers, customers. So to that point and to our most recent kind of effort, Lara and her team came. It was in December. We had lunch and to her point, on ways of working the. The initial briefings, what I love about it is they're just kind of brainstorms, but with one key difference.

[C]

Feed you or you fed us. But there was food to entice you

[D]

all beverage, hopefully about it. And their briefings, they turn into these amazing brainstorms, but they're backed by. There was a. You guys had like a six page document. And what I love as a strategist is like all the barriers were there, all the context was there, all the dirty details were there. When you ask like what's a great client brief? I'm like, the dirty details, what's the ask?

[A]

What's the ask?

[D]

What's the ask? What's the best, you know, what is the business challenge? What is it? I always ask what? Just tell me in your words. There's, there's words on paper. What is it? In your words? And so we had that sitting on the lunch table and we started brainstorming. It was. The brief was we have this community, we need a next generation. We are also big supporters of girls flag football. As the Chiefs, you sponsor leagues and

[A]

so the next generation is the next generation of young girls or is it broader than that?

[C]

I mean there's multi. Youth in general is a huge, large audience growth segment that we need to keep in caption and grow. But the focus and the offering that we could best challenge ourself with was through girls and young females.

[A]

Why was that? Why was it the.

[C]

Well, we've seen that that's where a lot of the growth is coming in terms of audience, in terms of merch sales. But one of the things that we've also seen is that as a participation vehicle, if what we found is participation does drive to fandom, obviously the National Football League is a male professional sports team, which means there will always be some level of barrier for some female audience because they can't in most places, at least at a professional level right now, play the sport. Right. So it's not like they're growing in soccer.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[C]

My now 9 year old daughter, I mean she's been playing soccer since she was 2 in 2 years old. I remember those fandom exactly like her fandom is that you can aspire to that. That in football. We didn't have that.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

We do now though with flag football. Flag football is the fastest growing sport in the US starting to be internationally as well. And girls flag football specifically is one of the fastest growing opportunities. It's going to be part of the LA 2028 Olympics. The NFL announced nine months ago that they will support professional flag football, men and women's team in the future. Meaning like we could have a professional women flag football team in Kansas City at some point.

[A]

Right.

[C]

But we needed young girls to play and participate. And the brief, part of the brief was we live in the state of Kansas and it's not even sanctioned in high school. So here we are having these like massive ambitions, but the state of Kansas hasn't even sanctioned it at high school at the time. Meaning we can pour everything we want into growing this opportunity. But if these young girls don't even have an opportunity to play in high school, which means that they can't get scholarships and like, there's no path. So that was like the big ambition was how do we bring in these young fans? And specifically, let's pinpoint female young fans. But the first job to be done is we need help getting this sanctioned. And this is not going to look like a traditional campaign. How do you reach essentially 70 people that make the decision in the state of Kansas to vote yes?

[E]

And so what we did was we started like, look, looking at all of the kind of iconic artifacts that belong to the Chiefs brand, right? And we looked at the flag and we said, well, what, what could we do with the flag that we could potentially alter to get people talking about? And you know, of course we're thinking about the built in audience that we had on the own channels because that's all we had, really. Yeah, right. We had, I think it's the 4.3 million on, on Instagram, YouTube, X, et cetera. So we're like, okay, we've got an audience that are highly engaged and they're highly engaged with all of the artifacts that surround the Chiefs. And so we looked at the flag and we said, well, what if a part of the flag was missing?

[C]

And just to stop Brad for one second for, for you that may not know or anyone that's listening to this, the flag itself is a big part of our world. We have, for example, every single year we have what's called Red Friday, which is a community program with Ronald McDonald, the McDonald's where we make a new flag, like literally a flag that you would hang outside your house. And that flag can be bought for $5 at McDonald's, $10 online, and that money goes to the Ronald McDonald's house. So every year for Red Friday as existed for 35 plus years, it's a longest standing, one of the longest standing community efforts that we have. But the flag itself has become the icon. Like I donated, I'm ready for football season. And it's, it's Typically the Friday before our first game. So that flag becomes something that becomes an asset or becomes a collectible that Chiefs fans, both locally and nationally are like, I'm going to go get my flag this year. So just to give you that context.

[A]

And coincidentally, it's flag football that you're

[E]

trying to throw at. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's a badge of honor here in kc. Like, when I first arrived, I was like, I can't look anywhere without seeing the Casey's flag for everyone today.

[C]

And then I was like, I bet everyone already has a flag on a

[E]

T shirt, on a hoodie, on a cap, on a bag. It's everywhere. And so we were like, perhaps we need to mess with that. That to get their attention. And we started thinking about flag football and the literal flag that you have

[A]

that's attached a strip of material.

[E]

Yeah.

[D]

When you play.

[E]

Yeah. So the idea that we ended up getting to was, well, if flag football is not sanctioned within Kansas yet, then that means that the KC Chiefs flag.

[A]

Interesting.

[E]

Should have a strip missing in it, which is.

[A]

Yes, yes, yes.

[C]

So.

[E]

So we posted a video of the flag waving up on a. On a. On a pole. And it got everybody just hypothesizing, oh, my gosh, what's happening? You know, is it got something to

[C]

do with a game?

[E]

They're like, is there a game happening in Spain? Is there a new uniform?

[D]

Is Travis Kelsey gonna announce something?

[E]

Yeah, Travis Kelsey's retiring.

[A]

This.

[E]

That. All of these crazy, like, hypothetical scenarios.

[A]

You guys planted them or.

[E]

We planted that.

[C]

We planted the flag. We didn't. We didn't plant the social commentary. That was all real.

[E]

So that was the thing, like, a very, very simple idea that we got to after quite a few rounds of, like, ideating because we were like, we don't have money to spend. We need to do this, like, a $0 idea. But how do you get everybody talking about it getting on, get onto the news? We need to do something very simple to something that that many people care about. And so that just got. It kind of sent the fuels. Sorry, Sent the chief fandom into, like, a frenzy online. So that was kind of the egg.

[A]

And then there was a reveal of. It was the film.

[E]

It was a reveal of it. But that was the thing that kind of got everybody talking about it to begin with.

[A]

What are you doing for young men? Because Hallmark and this initiative, flag football, were towards young women. I can absolutely see. Were. Strategically, it would be ridiculous to overlook what this Swift and Kelce thing has done in bringing A new audience in predominantly female in that instance. But when you want to be the world's favorite team, how are you going about building that amongst young men? Do you think it happens more organically in that or how do you go at that or is that the part of of your plan?

[C]

No, I mean I think we think about it as basically connecting with our existing fan base and providing new opportunities to them. Right.

[A]

So no matter where they are.

[C]

No matter where they are. And then the other side of the house is reaching new fans. A majority of the reach where a majority of the growth will come from is going for. For all sports. But for the Chiefs, based on our data is youth, which has men and women, boys and girls, which includes Gen Z and then Hispanics as a subgroup from there. And then certainly let's call it like the international, which obviously is men and women in all different nationalities, but they're slightly different just because the understanding of the sport is still quite young or quite new. So in terms of we have a whole other while we we don't necessarily all the world's largest tailgate was probably more male focused in terms of work we've done together. We have a whole other slew of things that we are doing daily in terms of ensuring that we're recruiting and or keeping the male audience. So we have a lot of other pieces that we and filters that we're using to reach that young male audience or male audience that to be honest to the point of the football season goes well beyond the four months of the year that or five months that

[D]

we actually don't even Just like partner advocating for flag football is not just girls like football, it's guys like football. And being an advocate for that for from an NFL franchise is actually pretty big. There's a lot of boys out there that want to play flag. They may or may not want to play football but like to be advocates for that for yeah for tackle football I think is pretty huge for a generation that wants to see those opportunities.

[A]

So my last question is about the players, your products. Right. What are the limitations on how you can use them? And because there has to be limitations because you would think you would use them more. I mean they are brands in and of themselves.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So what's the nature of the light licensing agreements between between team and player?

[C]

So they are their own businesses and their own brands. We work. There's a few different ways that we work with them. One and I'll just say it from, from the standpoint so a couple things our team is 53 players. And that's a really important piece that makes the Kansas City Chiefs different. And Coach Reed is a huge driver of that. We try to treat all of our players equally. And what that means, from my lens of a marketer, is that while there is a lot of content with Travis Kelsey and Patrick Mahomes and Chris Jones and some of our, you know, veterans and faces of the organization, we are very, very cognizant of making sure that our content's as equally weighted as possible. So, for example, we obviously have a new rookie class. If anyone goes on to the Chiefs Instagram channel, we just did this awesome rookie shoot where we had all the guys come out, we set up like a fake barbecue in the tailgate, and you. You can now get to know the rookies. So, like, that's just as important as how we work with them. And how do we try to. As equally as possible, these are rookies that.

[A]

That the year prior might have been just really famous college players who.

[C]

And for us, if we only make fandom through our. Through a player, while it makes sense in the short term, those players are not going to be part of the Chiefs active roster forever.

[A]

Yeah, they can trade as well.

[C]

If we're so reliant on one, then you're not really creating generational fandom. You're actually creating kind of a superficial connection. That also being said, we work really closely with their teams and their agents. So if there are overlapping opportunities, whether it's a partner like Oakley, which is a partner of. Of Patrick's as well as ours, whether there's a community initiative, that's really important to us, that's really important to them, we try to find overlap, but they are their own people and they can go out and do their own deals. When it comes to how we show them, we try to be equal. And then when a corporate partner comes to us, there's something called the rule of six within the NFL, which means that a partner has the right to use. Basically, there has to be six players in a shoot, in a photo, in a piece of content. And that's what corporate partners have rights to when they work with a club.

[A]

Let's leave it there. For those who are watching or listening, we are actually in the room where tonight we're gonna do this again, but with a larger panel of people. So you can see all these chairs are empty, but tonight they'll be full. But thank you, Laura. Thank you so much for. For taking the time to do a second episode with me.

[C]

Thank you for having me.

[B]

Really brilliant.

[A]

And to Chris and to Brad. Thank you guys a lot. This is great, and we appreciate it. Thank you. And we'll see everybody on the next episode.