How the NFL harnesses the power of emotion to drive record audiences - Tim Ellis & Glenn Cole

**Jon Evans** (0:06)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now, if you haven't noticed, the NFL season has just kicked off. Now, I've recently got into the NFL, and particularly the Super Bowl, of course, where we see some of the best advertising on the planet happen. So in this episode, I'm joined by Tim Ellis, who is the CMO for the NFL, and Glenn Cole, who is one of the founders of 72andSunny, who does all the creative work. This is one of the coolest conversations about creativity and how creativity can transform an industry and grow an audience massively for American football. This is a lot of fun. I know you're going to like it. Here it is. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

**Tim Ellis** (0:42)
Thank you.

**Jon Evans** (0:42)
Thank you. Maybe Tim, if I start with you, give everyone listening and watching a bit of a sense of your career and how you got to where you are today.

**Tim Ellis** (0:49)
Well, I started as an actor, believe it or not. I worked in the theater for a while, several years, and then lived all over the world doing all kinds of weird jobs, like, you know, working as an actor in Tokyo.
I was worked on tractors when I was in the Middle East. I was working on oil rigs in Scandinavia. Like I did all kinds of weird stuff. And then came back, got into the advertising business, was an agency guy actually for half of my career, or at least used to be half, about 12 years. And then made my first big client, you know, I actually, my biggest client wanted to hire me. So I went over there and then never looked back. I loved, actually loved being a client. I love creativity and I love being a part of that. And so I found that I could contribute the best as a client and I could ensure that the best work actually got out there to the world. And I love working with agencies and I love working with great creative teams. So that's been my career.

**Jon Evans** (1:51)
Fantastic. Now, when did you and Glenn first meet? Because that goes back to before the NFL.

**Tim Ellis** (1:58)
So before the NFL, I was at Activision, where we had Call of Duty and Destiny and Guitar Hero, a lot of big titles. And I came there from Volkswagen, where I know we're gonna talk about Super Bowl today, but when I was at Volkswagen, we did the little mini Darth Vader ad with the kid who has become now pretty famous ad. And so when I came to Activision, I wasn't gonna go backwards. I wanted to move forward, right? I wanted to do stuff that hadn't been done before. And so I was there and the agency that were giving me ideas, they just were not getting me excited. And I kept trying to sort of work with them to get it to happen. It just wasn't happening. So I heard about these guys. He actually had a pretty small shop at that time. And so I met them and I'm like, wow, these guys are the real deal. I mean, like the partners. So I met him and a few of his partners. And like the pedigree of where they'd come from and the type of advertising they'd been doing and so forth, but I could tell that they were really the best in the business. So we pitched the business and they like killed it. And we had what, seven years of very successful relationship. Soldier and all of us was the Call of Duty theme that we kept doing, you know, again and again. So I think that it's sort of what we work incredibly well together. So that's where we first met, yeah, when Call of Duty.

**Jon Evans** (3:16)
Amazing. So Glenn, how was it for you when meeting Tim? And tell us the moment that that happened.

**Glenn Cole** (3:22)
Tim was introduced to me by Eric Hirschberg, who was the CEO at the time at Activision, and said, you got to come over. I want you to meet the greatest CMO on earth, Tim Ellis. So I was like, well, that's quite the intro, a lot to live up to. And we hit it off right away. I think we both were both passionate about creativity. We're both passionate about sports. So he had, you know, come up in advertising in Europe at a time when I had been, I think, running the Nike global Nike soccer business. Sorry, football for those Europeans. I have to be my American self.

**Jon Evans** (3:55)
We'll be doing that a few times this episode, don't worry.