The Kansas City Chiefs enter Sunday’s Super Bowl having already won — when it comes to commercials.
Over the past year, star players Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, along with coach Andy Reid, have been inescapable to TV viewers. Flipping channels, you might find Kelce baring his arm for a Pfizer COVID-19 shot, Mahomes hollering in support of a State Farm promotion or Reid coveting some chicken “nuggies.”
During this NFL season, companies featured Mahomes in 19 ad spots, Kelce in 10 and Reid in four. The estimated amount spent to air the ads on television was $178 million for Mahomes, $120 million for Kelce and $69 million for Reid, according to iSpot.tv, an ad measurement company. Those are the highest numbers for any sports figures. Because there were several commercials in which at least two of the three appeared, the dollar totals have some overlap.
“Brands invested to make the Chiefs-themed ads hard to miss,” said Cassandra Arora, chief marketing officer of iSpot, which estimates the spend of an ad based on the market rate for how much companies have to pay to air commercials on TV. Basically, the more spend an ad has, the more viewers are seeing it.
By comparison, Deion Sanders, the former NFL star who coaches the University of Colorado’s football team, and Nick Saban, the recently retired University of Alabama football coach, each appeared in ads worth around $20 million during the same period. Christian McCaffrey, the San Francisco running back, appeared in ads with a spend of $46 million, while 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy appeared in one ad — for Toyota — worth just $67,000.
A few factors explain the marketing blitz for the three Chiefs: consistent success, the marketing budgets of insurance companies and, of course, Taylor Swift.
Companies capitalized on Mahomes’ prodigious talent starting after his second season in 2018, in which he threw for 50 touchdowns. He flaunted his hair in an ad for Head and Shoulders; stood alongside Aaron Rodgers, then a quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, in a State Farm commercial; and promoted Amazon Web Services’ sleek football analytics. In 2022, after he had won a Super Bowl and an MVP award, the ad spend on the 21 commercials featuring Mahomes was $164 million, more than those featuring basketball stars LeBron James and Stephen Curry combined.
Kelce appeared in a few lower-profile commercials, and Reid occasionally joined Mahomes in ad spots. But a second Super Bowl victory last year and a celebrity relationship changed things immensely, particularly for Kelce.
Since the start of the 2023 NFL season, around when Kelce started his high-profile relationship with Swift, the global music superstar, the Chiefs have reached a new level of ubiquity. Thanks in large part to Swift’s appearances at Kansas City games, more women are watching the NFL — and specifically the Chiefs, said Kim Whitler, a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s business school.
“There’s incredible new interest in these players, and part of this is they’re bringing in this new group of people who were never interested in the NFL,” Whitler said.
Their commercial appearances jumped accordingly. Reid appeared in four commercials in the 2023 season, up from just one the season before. Kelce made the same number of ads that he did in 2022 — six — but his spending jump, to $120 million from $895,000, was the biggest. (It is unclear whether any of the three will be featured in a Super Bowl ad this year.)
They were compensated handsomely. Mahomes makes roughly $20 million from his endorsement deals, according to Forbes, on top of the more than $50 million paid to him annually by the Chiefs. Kelce takes in a reported $5 million from his deals, in addition to the roughly $14 million per year he is paid to play football. It is not known how much Reid makes from his commercial appearances, though his annual coaching salary is estimated to be at least $10 million.
The spots were diverse. In addition to his Pfizer spot, Kelce appeared in ads for Campbell’s Soup, Subway, State Farm, Lowe’s and credit reporting company Experian.
Kelce’s star was well-established in football and growing outside it, spurred on by that second Super Bowl victory last February and his hosting of “Saturday Night Live” the next month. Companies already had Kelce on their shortlist of celebrities who could drive engagement for their brands, said Jason Damata, a media consultant. But after he started dating Swift, Kelce jumped the line.
“When he hit the zeitgeist, they were poised to focus their investment and reap the cultural and business rewards,” Damata said of companies teaming up with Kelce.
The investment in the Chiefs started in 2019 with Mahomes joining Rodgers, a longtime State Farm pitchman. Large insurance companies such as State Farm, GEICO and Progressive collectively spend billions of dollars annually on advertising. In 2022, State Farm spent $125 million, or more than two-thirds of its estimated ad spend during the NFL season, on commercials featuring Kansas City players; this season, State Farm has poured in $130 million, or slightly more than 70% of its spend during the season.
Linda Lee, chief marketing officer of the meals and beverages division at Campbell’s, said her company had begun to think about working with Kelce after last year’s Super Bowl, in which he faced off against his brother Jason and the Philadelphia Eagles.
But she couldn’t have predicted that making an ad featuring the Kelce brothers, along with their mother, before the 2023 season would be followed by such a meteoric rise in fame for Travis. Since releasing the ad, Lee said, the company has garnered four times the ordinary engagement on TikTok with its Chunky products.
“There was a little good fortune in the selection of this family,” Lee said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.