In the NFL’s new kickoff campaign, the league’s biggest stars are wiggling their hips, shimmying their shoulders, doing the worm, and recreating Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.
The spot, titled “The Season Is Your Stage,” debuted on August 20 to drum up excitement for football season, which begins on September 9 with the annual NFL Kickoff Game. It was created in partnership with the NFL’s lead creative agency, 72andSunny, and includes cameos from players like Bijan Robinson of the Atlanta Falcons, Dion Dawkins of the Buffalo Bills, and Travis Hunter of the Jacksonville Jaguars. Each player is shown practicing their “cellys” for the coming season. That’s internet jargon for the celebration dances that have become popular fodder for viral NFL content on social media.
According to Marissa Solis, NFL senior VP of global and brand marketing, the campaign is one way that her team is working to bring the NFL’s digital fan base—which tends to skew younger and more female than its regular season viewership—into the league’s main stage programming.
“I think it’s a way to acknowledge that all of these platforms are now interconnected,” Solis says. “They can’t all live in silos, especially because this [younger] audience is always on, watching everywhere. We have to be where they are, not the other way around.”
Inside the NFL’s social media playbook
Over the past several years, the NFL’s fandom has been seeing a kind of modern day renaissance—and the brand has been working to adjust in real time.
In 2023, after years of predictions from analysts that the NFL was on the decline, the league got a major boost in the cultural zeitgeist from the reveal of the relationship between the Kansas City Chiefs’ star tight end, Travis Kelce, and the pop megastar Taylor Swift, leading to a jump in viewership from young and female audiences. On social media, the relationship’s ties to the NFL have been an durable topic of conversation, one that the league has embraced.
As the league benefits from the “Taylor Swift effect,” it’s been investing in its digital presence in a big way, working to meet young audiences where they are by turning pivotal moments in the season into short-form content extravaganzas.
“Five, six years ago, we started a concerted effort to reach what we call ‘growth audiences,’” Solis explains. “One of the critical growth audiences is young people. When you think about Gen A, Gen Z, they’re the digital generation. We know that they’re not necessarily just viewing four hours of a game—they’re engaging day in and day out, 24/7, on social platforms.”
This April, the league gave Fast Company a behind-the-scenes look at its social media strategy for its three-day college draft, an annual marquee moment for the brand. That effort included a programming team of 10 people hunkered down in their social media command center in Pittsburgh, churning out about 1,000 social posts every day. According to the league, on TikTok during the draft in 2025, 30% of the audience was female, and 44% was between 18 and 24 years old, significantly younger and more female than the NFL’s reach during the regular season.
Solis says the start of the season is another major opportunity for the NFL to lead the fan conversation on socials. Last year, the league’s internal data showed that NFL kickoff week video views were up 13%, minutes spent on socials were up 25%, and engagements up 6%—all records for a kickoff week. This year, they’re looking to maintain that streak.
According to Solis, two key genres of NFL content tend to perform especially well with younger generations on platforms like Instagram and TikTok: giving fans an inside look at players’ lives off the field, including their relationships and hobbies; and referencing how the NFL is intersecting with culture more broadly. “The Season Is Your Stage” includes a bit of both.
“There are many times when what happens on the field influences what happens in culture,” Solis says. “But then there are times when what happens on TikTok or on these platforms will influence what happens on the field, our own players. This is one of those moments. The touchdown celebration started on the field, then it went viral, and now our players are looking virally to get inspiration. There’s just this relationship between the two that is really unique and special that we wanted to explore in this campaign.”
Cellys in the spotlight
Over the course of the 2025-2026 football season, celebration content on the NFL’s socials drove 340 million views, 603 million impressions, and 18 million interactions.
And it’s no surprise that cellys have become such a broadly popular topic online, considering that they have all the ingredients for viral content: subverting expectations (i.e., watching tough football players pause after a touchdown to bust a move), editability (there are infinite ways to remix a celly clip), and replicability (who doesn’t want to invent their own celly?)
For all of these reasons, Zach Hilder, chief creative officer at 72andSunny, says that cellys were the perfect fodder for this year’s kickoff campaign.
“Before every season, our team, along with Marissa [Solis’s marketing team], starts to do research,” Hilder says. That means scouring the internet ecosystem to understand what fans are talking about, where the league is headed, and what the big story of the year might look like.
“One of the things that we saw were the touchdown celebrations exploding across TikTok,” he says. “I mean, the cellys are built for TikTok—you see what happens on the field go into TikTok, and then the players are getting influenced, and they’re making these TikTok dances into celebrations and calling people out in culture. It felt like a really cool way to bring this all together.”
To capture the process of celly creation, 72andSunny built a full-on celly studio—complete with a giant mirror and turf—where players were asked to rehearse cellys before they’re unveiled on the field. The Indianapolis Colts’ Cam Bynum, who’s known for choreographing some of the most viral cellys, was cast as the “NFL celly coordinator,” and is seen throughout the spot helping his fellow players perfect their moves.
Hilder says a good chunk of the video was guided by the players, who were asked to bring their own percolating ideas to the shoot.
“We asked the players when they came in, ‘Okay, what’s bubbling up in your mind? What are the things you want to do this season?’” Hilder says. “One of the most unexpected ones was Nico Collins, the wide receiver for the Texans. He got on the floor and started gear shifting. I’ve never seen anyone move their butt to look like a car before.”
The final ad stitches together snippets of players ironing out their cellys with clips of fans’ own viral celly interpretations. It also includes multiple cameos of the iconic sugarcane grass costumes from Bad Bunny’s 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, which Hilder says cost $1,000 on eBay (apparently, the NFL wasn’t keeping any in the archives).
Now that “The Season Is Your Stage” has rolled out, Solis says the goal is to keep the conversation going throughout the season. The campaign will show up as short-form videos on socials and a hashtag, via live celly studios before games, and potentially even at local bars.
If fans are lucky, they might even see one or two brand new moves from the spot—like Collins’s gear shift—out on the field.
