The Los Angeles Rams today are debuting their first marketing campaign since the club received permission to relocate from St. Louis in January.
Dubbed “We’re Home,” the effort features three players at locations around L.A. The ads, which will appear only outdoors, are on more than 100 billboards and wrapped around city buses, trains and transit shelters.
“It is a fun play on football coming back to L.A.,” said Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ executive vice president of football operations and chief operating officer. “It is more of a traditional brand awareness, market-your-players, market-your-brand campaign than a traditional sports campaign to go sell tickets. We don’t need to go sell tickets.”
The Rams are sold out for their first season in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and sold nearly 90,000 tickets for their first preseason game, a record high for a non-regular-season contest in the U.S.
The ads, which feature players Tavon Austin, Aaron Donald and Todd Gurley, were developed by local ad agency Art Machine in conjunction with the NFL. The league helped develop the tag lines “Welcome Home” and “We’re Home,” which have already appeared on tickets and in sponsor material.
“It was all hands on deck,” Demoff said of the creative.
The Rams have been working with Art Machine since the move, including on promotions surrounding the NFL draft. Art Machine is a unit of the Engine Group.
It is important that the agency is L.A. based, said Demoff, to ensure a local flair.
The campaign is on both static and digital billboards, a large scale painted building, and aerial beach ads, in addition to the transit element. There is no distribution in other forms of media, be it digital, print or TV.
One ad features Gurley appearing to hurdle a beach boardwalk, while another depicts Austin diving out from between skyscrapers to catch a pass. Donald is featured as a giant running over the Griffith Observatory.
