Swifties and the NFL — a match made in marketing heaven

Thanks to OZ’s Jake Wax for sharing a couple of links about how the Taylor Swift Effect has come to the National Football League.

Swift, as rumor has it, recently began dating a Kansas City Chiefs player, Travis Kelce, and she has appeared in the crowd at his last two games. Ticket prices and TV ratings for those games skyrocketed.  Kelce is a great player who was popular among NFL fans already, but now he has ascended into the wider pop culture stratosphere, with a million new Instagram followers and sales of his merchandise up 400 percent.

The NFL is embracing the moment, too, and making no apologies for it.  The Swift-Kelce relationship has created a legion of new fans. Although a lot of women watch football, the NFL has struggled to attract diehard female fans. However, the most recent Sunday night game attracted 2 million more women compared to the previous three Sunday night games. Surely, some of them will fall in love with the game, regardless of what happens with Swift and Kelce in the future. 

The league has tried many things to grow its female fan base, from sponsoring flag football for high school girls to toning down the military metaphors in its broadcasts and videos, but Taylor Swift’s newfound fandom may prove more effective than any of those tactics.

And perhaps there is a reverse benefit, too.  Swift has a lot of male fans who are mildly ashamed of themselves for enjoying her music. This may help to erase some of that stigma. “There’s this concept that they’re guilty pleasure songs,” one broadcaster said. “There’s a fragile masculinity thing about liking the same thing as a teenage girl.”

The relationship also offers a myriad other possibilities for marketers – in fact, Ryan Reynolds and State Farm are already on the case.

This is psychologically interesting, too. As Marcus Collins writes in Forbes, there is a lot of social contagion here. Swifties aren't following Taylor Swift into the NFL, exactly. Rather, they are following each other, in kind of a herd mentality. So, in some ways this is less about Swift, per se, and more about the power of the community that has blossomed around her.