Case study · Integrated campaign · NFL · 2025
The amplification finding: NFL My Cause My Cleats 2025
I ran the publishing program behind 13 NFL player stories, and the post-campaign analysis I built showed that four league-amplified stories drove 78.6% of its 14.1M organic views, a finding that changed how the next cycle was planned.
At a glance
- Role
- Ran the master publishing plan across five channel types for all 13 stories; designed the packaging framework; maintained the campaign control system; built the post-campaign analysis. Production, partnerships, and paid media belonged to others on the team.
- Key decisions
- One reusable packaging template for all 13 stories; sequencing weighted toward channels most likely to seed reach; an analysis built around leverage, not totals.
- Selected result
- 14.1M organic views and 336K engagements across 63 placements, with four league-amplified stories driving 78.6% of the views.
- Demonstrates
- Distribution across a partner network I didn’t control, packaging quality held at volume, and honest analysis.
The campaign, the problem
My Cause My Cleats is the NFL’s annual cause campaign. For 2025, Stand Together and Freethink produced documentary-style stories about 13 players and the causes they back. Each story had to travel through a network nobody fully controlled: league channels, team channels, the players’ own accounts, partner nonprofits, earned media, and the brand’s owned social, all moving on different timelines under different approval chains, inside a compressed league-driven window. A story could be excellent and still go nowhere if the network didn’t activate in the right order.
My role
I ran the master publishing plan across all five channel types for all 13 stories: narrative framing, copywriting, platform adaptation, and performance optimization, inside league, legal, and brand constraints I didn’t set. I designed the packaging framework each story shipped on. I maintained the campaign control system that tracked collaborator tags, live links, and activation status. And I produced the post-campaign analysis after close. Production, partnerships, and paid media belonged to others on the team.
Three decisions that mattered
- A reusable packaging template, mine by design. Headline options, platform copy, thumbnail direction, descriptions, and hashtags built once and adapted per story, so 13 stories shipped at one quality bar instead of 13 one-offs.
- Sequencing weighted toward the channels most likely to seed reach, with follow-up pushes for channels that hadn’t activated within the expected window, visible because activation was tracked in one place.
- An analysis built around leverage, not totals. Instead of reporting what the campaign got, I asked which input determined what each story got.
The copy itself
One example from the 13: the Jonathan Allen story, partnered with CarePortal, a platform connecting real-time needs of families in crisis to community members. Headline options I wrote for the published YouTube release:
Jonathan Allen lived in foster care. Here’s how he’s backing foster families | My Cause My Cleats
Jonathan Allen grew up in foster care. Now he’s joined the fight to keep families together | My Cause My Cleats
Why Jonathan Allen backs this community-powered tool keeping families together | My Cause My Cleats
Authored copy from the published campaign package: player’s lived stake first, cause mechanism second, brand nowhere in the headline. The full package carried thumbnail text, platform descriptions, and per-network adaptations built on the same template.
Why Jonathan Allen backs this community-powered tool keeping families together | My Cause My Cleats
Results, with their real shape
The organic program generated 14.1M views and 336K engagements across 63 placements. But the campaign’s own structure is the honest headline: roughly 98% of those views happened on league and team channels, and my analysis showed four league-amplified stories drove 78.6% of all organic views while unamplified stories averaged under 500K regardless of creative quality. Where the content did land, it landed well: campaign social listening measured 82% strongly positive sentiment, and Stand Together–tagged content engaged at 4.1% against 1.5% for the broader campaign. Counting earned media and broadcast placements that extended beyond my role on the project, the campaign-wide total reached 17.6M organic views.
| League-amplified tier (4 of 13 stories) | Standard tier (9 of 13 stories) | |
|---|---|---|
| League/team posting | Active, timely | Inconsistent or absent |
| Share of organic views | 78.6% combined | Remainder; average under 500K per story |
| Creative package | Same template, same quality bar | Same template, same quality bar |
What the analysis could not settle
The analysis identified the distribution input that separated the highest-reach stories. It did not make league pickup predictable. The next cycle still required judgment about institutional fit, timing, and partner readiness, which is why I recommended treating amplification as a planning input rather than a promise.
What changed next
Resonance and reach turned out to be different levers. The recommendation I drew from the analysis: treat league and team amplification as a pre-production input, sequence packaging effort toward stories likely to get institutional pickup, and build a real plan B for the ones that won’t. That reframed the next cycle’s planning.