Case study · Integrated campaign · NFL · 2024

Three packages, three outcomes: NFL My Cause My Cleats 2024

Three NFL player stories went out the same week, built the same way. Rachaad White’s reached every channel it was planned for. Miles Killebrew’s never became a separate player, team, or league post. I ran the packaging and the partner coordination for all three, and wrote the report that tracked where each one actually landed.

The campaign

My Cause My Cleats is the NFL’s annual cause campaign, the one week a year the league lets players wear custom cleats for a cause they choose. For 2024, Stand Together and Freethink built stories around three players: Miles Killebrew of the Steelers with Café Momentum Pittsburgh, a restaurant staffed by young people leaving the justice system; Demario Davis of the Saints, a substitute teacher before he was a linebacker, on individualized learning; and Rachaad White of the Buccaneers with CarePortal, which connects families in crisis to resources before a child enters foster care.

Each story shipped as a marquee cut and a vertical cutdown, released November 26, 2024, across Stand Together’s YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X, plus the players’ own accounts, their teams, the partner nonprofits, the league, and a paid distribution partnership with Complex.

My role

I turned copy drafted with others into packages that could publish cleanly on five platforms, then coordinated the people who might carry them: team social staffs, player representatives, nonprofit partners, and the league. My work covered thumbnail and asset direction, platform adaptations, tags, links, calls to action, direct email follow-up, and the 24-hour performance report. I also supported the Complex distribution workstream. Film production, paid media, and the business relationship sat elsewhere on the team.

The packaging system

Every asset ran against a fixed rule set, some of it imposed by the league and some of it editorial judgment. No team logos and no NFL logos in thumbnails. No pitch or stadium imagery, which rules out most of what a sports campaign would reach for by default. Team colors and team fonts were allowed, so identity had to be carried typographically instead of through marks. What worked was a player looking directly at camera, or a close shot of the cleat itself.

The platform adaptations followed the same discipline. X took the vertical cutdown because short mobile-sized media performs there. Facebook took the four-minute marquee, where length was less of a constraint. TikTok took the cutdown with the vertical thumbnail. On Instagram, every carousel asset needed one aspect ratio, so the stills were reformatted to sit alongside the video. These small choices decided whether a partner could publish what we sent or had to stop and fix it first. Packages that need fixing tend to sit.

The copy, as packaged

The headlines and captions were drafted with others. My part was selection, platform fit, tagging, and the link and CTA structure underneath them.

My Cause My Cleats: Steelers’ Miles Killebrew teams up with Pittsburgh youth

My Cause My Cleats: Saints’ Demario Davis champions learning

My Cause My Cleats: Buccaneers’ Rachaad White fosters real change for families

The social copy opened on the player’s own words where they were strong enough to carry the post:

“Wasted potential is one of the saddest tragedies, and I’ll do everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t exist in this city.” For his #MyCauseMyCleats, the Steelers’ Miles Killebrew trades cleats for a Café Momentum apron to support the bright futures of youth exiting the justice system.

Published 2024 campaign copy. The pattern the 2025 template later formalized is already visible: player and cause first, brand out of the headline, the organization entering mid-copy rather than leading.

Miles Killebrew · Café Momentum Demario Davis · individualized learning Rachaad White · CarePortal

What happened

The campaign recorded 5,654,038 total views and 27,913 engagements. That figure combines paid and organic. Most of it is paid YouTube placement that was not mine to buy or run, so it mostly reflects the media budget.

The number that measures the coordination is 708,800 views from separate posts published by a player, a team, or the NFL. It counts posts those partners published themselves, so it excludes the Instagram collaborations, which are single posts displayed on every accepted account and counted once under Stand Together. It splits very unevenly across the three stories.

The report

I wrote the 24-hour performance update the day after release: reach, views, and engagements per player, then a per-player accounting of what had been asked for, what had been accepted, what had not, and what follow-up each required. It named the Steelers and the Saints as outstanding rather than rounding the campaign up to a success, and it flagged White’s package as the model, since it was the only one where the player posted and pinned the video himself.

Reporting it as a list of open asks with names attached, instead of a summary of totals, kept the gaps visible while there was still time to chase them.

What this could not settle

Three stories cannot separate a distribution effect from a coincidence. It was possible in 2024 that the Steelers were simply busy, that the Saints had a policy, that White happened to be a player who enjoys posting. What I had was an observation and a strong suspicion, not a finding. The following year the campaign ran on thirteen stories, which was enough to measure it, and the analysis I produced then showed league amplification accounting for 98.1% of the organic program’s views.