State Farm insurance is cashing in on the buzz around pop star Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce’s rumored romance—all thanks to Ryan Reynolds’ marketing company, Maximum Effort.
At the Oct. 1 National Football League matchup between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Washington Commanders, Eagles center Jason Kelce was on the field. That Kelce also happens to be the brother, podcast co-host, and commercial co-star of Travis Kelce.
Thanks to some advance planning, the actor Kevin Miles, who has played the character of Jake in the State Farm advertisements since 2020, was able to find Kelce matriarch Donna in the crowd, grab a selfie, and post with the caption “in my red era.”
The cheeky references to the Red singer stemmed from the fact that Donna Kelce was seen enjoying a game with Swift a week prior in Kansas City, which caused a media frenzy. Reynolds, who witnessed the buzz first-hand—he was in the same box as Swift with his wife (actor Blake Lively) and friend (Hugh Jackman of Wolverine fame)—saw a marketing opportunity around the Taylor Swift effect. Without any formal ad placement, State Farm bagged one of the most effective campaigns in the NFL-verse, simply by making a Swiftian allusion.
The Taylor Swift economy, by the digits
958%: How much conversations for the Chiefs games against the Bears and Jets spiked on X (aka Twitter) after Taylor Swift appeared at a Chiefs home game against the Chicago Bears on Sept. 24, according to AdWeek, which cited analytics firm Sprout Social. The keywords and hashtags that dominated those messages weren’t NFL-related but “Taylor Swift,” “#TaylorSwift,” “Taylor,” and “Swift.”
300: Standard prime-time ads, or...
1,758: ...cable spots worth of reach for when NBC replayed Jake’s appearance during a Sunday Night Football game, as per TV measurement and analytics company EDO
27 million: Viewers of an Oct. 1 Chiefs-Jets game that Swift attended, up 22% versus the prior year, including 2 million more women, according to Ad Age
$5 billion: Contribution of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour to the US economy’s consumer spending this year. Typically, every $100 spent on live performances generates an estimated $300 in ancillary local spending on things like hotels, food, and transportation, but for the Eras tour, Swifties have splurged an estimated $1,300-$1,500 on all that as well as outfits, costumes, merchandise, and more.
Quotable: Swifties’ ad engagement
“No one can capture the zeitgeist quite like Taylor Swift. And you know, her appearance at the Kansas City Chiefs games really dominated the cultural landscape for like five or six days, so when we kind of arrived at this idea during a brainstorm for another project, it just felt too good to resist.”
—Maximum Effort co-founder George Dewey in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter
A brief timeline of State Farm’s Swift marketing (pun intended)
Sept. 28: The idea to place someone next to Donna Kelce is floated.
Sept. 29: Maximum Effort approaches Alyson Griffin, the head of marketing for State Farm. Calls were made to Jason and Donna Kelce as well as Taylor Swift, looping them in and getting approval.
Sept. 30: Maximum Effort and State Farm host a video meeting to prepare for the match in Philadelphia the next afternoon.