The home improvement chain Lowe's is discovering that one of the wisest decisions it made in recent years had nothing to do with lumber pricing or supply chain logistics. It was signing a sponsorship deal with the National Football League in 2019, back when the league's audience skewed toward demographics that media buyers have been targeting since the Reagan administration.
On Thursday, the retailer will revive "Earn Your Sunday," a campaign that first appeared earlier this year encouraging football fans to complete their household tasks during the week so that Sundays might be devoted, guilt-free, to watching large men collide with one another at high speed.
"It's so relatable and human that you want to get the to-do list done so that you can just veg out and watch the game," said Jen Wilson, the company's senior vice president and chief marketing officer. She described the campaign as "some of the best work that we've done across our sports platforms."
The new spots, produced by Dentsu Creative, feature the Cleveland Browns' Myles Garrett and the Dallas Cowboys' Micah Parsons demonstrating what the advertising industry would call "overt product placement" — an Ego power washer here, a Weber grill there, assorted drills from Lowe's house brand Kobalt — while displaying the sort of evident delight in mugging for cameras that suggests the athletes' day rates were agreeable to all parties.
What Lowe's could not have anticipated six years ago was that Taylor Swift would begin a relationship with Travis Kelce, who joined the company's "Home Team" roster in 2024, thereby introducing the retailer to an audience of young women who had not previously associated Sunday afternoons with either defensive linemen or cordless drills.
"The NFL — thanks to Taylor Swift and all the Swifties — has become one of the most watched programs for Gen Z, and that's exactly where we want to be," Ms. Wilson said.
(One imagines the 2019 presentation deck did not include a slide labeled "Contingency: Pop Star Romance.")
Joe Favorito, a sports marketing consultant and professor at Columbia University, noted that the female audience "is one that is growing vastly with the NFL," a demographic shift that home improvement retailers, who have spent decades figuring out how to speak to women without being patronizing about it, are eager to court.
Sometimes the best sponsorship strategy is simply to have been there when the story changed.
Original story published in adweek.com: "How Lowe's Turned Its NFL Sponsorship Into a Play for Gen Z"