How the NFL Used We Ready to Launch Its 100th Season
The NFL's "We Ready" campaign is a one-minute anthem film created by 72andSunny Los Angeles, directed by Stuart McIntyre of Somesuch, and released in August 2019 in the United States to mark the opening of the league's 100th season, positioning collective readiness as a shared emotional state uniting players, fans, and communities.
Published on August 15, 2019, the film arrived three weeks before the NFL's 100th season kicked off on September 5 of that year. That timing was deliberate. The campaign needed to build anticipatory energy across the United States at a moment when the league's centennial carried both historical weight and commercial opportunity. Rather than cataloguing a century of achievement, "We Ready" looked forward, centering its proposition on the feeling of being prepared — physically, mentally, and collectively — for what comes next.
The campaign's core creative idea frames readiness not as a purely athletic concept but as a communal mindset shared by everyone who connects with the sport. Players and fans are placed on equal emotional footing, each carrying the same charge of anticipation. This positioning reinforces the NFL's stated ambition, documented in platform materials, to function as a cultural and communal force rather than purely a sporting competition. In the United States, where the NFL occupies a unique position at the intersection of entertainment, identity, and civic ritual, that framing carries considerable strategic logic.
The film featured eight named NFL players — Alvin Kamara, Deshaun Watson, Christian McCaffrey, DeAndre Hopkins, Jarvis Landry, Landon Collins, Sterling Shepard, and Todd Gurley — alongside the Los Angeles Bobcats all-women's football team, high-school football participants, and coach Rob Mendez, according to reporting by horizont.net and musebyclios.com. The inclusive casting extended the campaign's reach beyond the sport's traditional core audience, signalling that readiness belongs to anyone who chooses to claim it. "We Ready" earned a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting solid creative ambition tempered by the structural challenges of anthem filmmaking at scale.
The NFL entered its 100th season facing a media landscape that had fundamentally shifted around it. Streaming competition, shifting viewer habits, and a more fragmented attention economy required the league to do more than announce a new season — it needed to reassert emotional ownership of a cultural moment. The "We Ready" campaign, developed by 72andSunny Los Angeles in 2019, was built to meet that pressure directly.
The strategic insight driving the campaign is rooted in sports psychology and fan identity research: the pre-game state of collective anticipation is one of the most emotionally charged moments in sports consumption. By making that anticipatory feeling — rather than any specific game, team, or player — the campaign's subject, 72andSunny created a platform broad enough to hold the NFL's enormously diverse audience in the United States. The approach avoids the fragmentation risk that comes with favouring one franchise or fanbase over another, a structural tension that any NFL-wide campaign must navigate.
In the United States, sports media rights and advertising represent a significant portion of the broader sports economy. According to PwC, the North American sports market has consistently ranked among the largest globally, with the NFL sitting at its commercial centre. The league's centennial season provided a rare moment to amplify that position through storytelling rather than statistics. Competitors in the broader sports and fitness entertainment space — including the NBA, which has aggressively pursued younger and international audiences, and ESPN as a media platform competing for attention share — had each invested heavily in identity-driven brand content by 2019, raising the creative bar for any league-wide campaign.
The decision to anchor the campaign in the concept of performance readiness also gave the NFL a foothold in the broader fitness and performance culture that had grown substantially across the United States by the late 2010s. As mediapost.com has noted in its coverage of sports marketing trends, leagues increasingly compete not just with each other but with fitness platforms, lifestyle brands, and direct-to-consumer sports content for the attention of active and aspirationally active consumers. "We Ready" speaks directly to that audience without abandoning the league's existing fanbase.
Stuart McIntyre directed "We Ready" for the NFL through production company Somesuch, working with a full creative and technical ensemble assembled by 72andSunny Los Angeles. The film's production infrastructure reflects the scale expected of a centennial campaign for the United States' most-watched sports league.
Director of photography Ross Giardina shot the film, according to musebyclios.com and reel360.com, bringing a visual language that moves between the intimacy of individual preparation and the sweep of collective gathering. The camera work reinforces the campaign's central tension: readiness is both deeply personal and unmistakably communal. Producer Suzie Greene Tedesco and executive producer Molly Griffin managed production, with Kerry Haynie serving as head of production, per musebyclios.com. Writer Garrett Radford shaped the film's narrative architecture at the script stage.
Post-production was handled by Shape + Light, with editing completed at Cabin Editorial. Sound design came from Human and Lime, with audio mixing delivered by Lime Studios — a division of labour that reflects the complexity of building a sonic identity capable of carrying emotional weight across broadcast, digital, and social placements across the United States.
The film's most distinctive audio choice centres on the melody from "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye," a song with deep roots in stadium culture across the United States, according to adsoftheworld.com and horizont.net. The chant "We Ready for Y'all" is performed to that melody, transforming a culturally familiar tune into a forward-facing declaration. This strategy borrows recognised sonic memory and redirects its emotional charge, giving the film an immediate sense of shared ownership without requiring the audience to learn something new. The casting — eight named NFL stars alongside the Los Angeles Bobcats, high-school players, and coach Rob Mendez — ensures the film's visual register matches its sonic inclusivity, presenting readiness as a state available across gender, age, and level of competition.
Verified performance data for the "We Ready" campaign across paid media channels is not comprehensively available in the public domain. However, ispot.tv, which tracks television advertising delivery across the United States, documented the spot's broadcast presence during the NFL's 2019 season opening period, confirming the campaign reached a substantial national television audience at a moment of peak sports viewership.
The campaign's structural effectiveness can be assessed through several observable indicators. According to musebyclios.com and adsoftheworld.com, "We Ready" was recognised within the advertising industry as a notable piece of sports brand communication for the NFL's centennial year. The broader 2019 NFL centennial creative programme — which also included "The 100-Year Game" Super Bowl spot, which according to En Wikipedia won the USA Today Ad Meter for best Super Bowl advertisement, and "The Next 100," which according to prnewswire.com won four Clio Awards — establishes the creative standard against which "We Ready" sits. Within that context, the anthem film functions as the emotional foundation on which those later, higher-profile executions were built.
The campaign's Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a film that executes its brief with clarity and craft but operates within the well-worn conventions of the sports anthem genre. The inclusive casting, the melody-driven audio strategy, and the collective-readiness proposition are all intelligent choices. What limits the score is the degree to which "We Ready" stays within genre expectations rather than redefining them — a structural challenge common to opening-season campaigns, where emotional familiarity is often a feature rather than a limitation. According to stagwellglobal.com, 72andSunny's partnership with the NFL extended to at least eight years by 2026, suggesting the agency's cumulative understanding of the league's audience is a durable competitive asset that individual campaigns like "We Ready" both reflect and advance.
"We Ready" is a one-minute anthem film created by 72andSunny Los Angeles for the NFL, released on August 15, 2019, in the United States. It was designed to launch the NFL's 100th season, using the concept of collective readiness to unite players, fans, and communities around the start of the season.
Stuart McIntyre directed "We Ready" through production company Somesuch. Director of photography Ross Giardina shot the film, with producer Suzie Greene Tedesco and executive producer Molly Griffin overseeing production. Post-production was completed by Shape + Light, with editing by Cabin Editorial and sound design by Human and Lime.
Eight named NFL players appeared in "We Ready": Alvin Kamara, Deshaun Watson, Christian McCaffrey, DeAndre Hopkins, Jarvis Landry, Landon Collins, Sterling Shepard, and Todd Gurley. The film also featured the Los Angeles Bobcats all-women's football team, high-school football participants, and coach Rob Mendez, according to horizont.net and musebyclios.com.
"We Ready" uses the melody from "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye," a song with deep roots in United States stadium culture, according to adsoftheworld.com. The chant "We Ready for Y'all" is performed to that melody, repurposing a familiar collective sound into a forward-facing declaration of anticipation for the NFL's 100th season.
"We Ready" received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects strong craft and inclusive casting but acknowledges the campaign operates within established sports anthem conventions. It served as the emotional foundation for the NFL's broader 2019 centennial creative programme, which included award-winning executions at the Super Bowl.
72andSunny's partnership with the NFL extended to at least eight years by 2026, according to stagwellglobal.com. The 2019 centennial year represented a high point of that relationship, producing multiple campaigns including "We Ready," the Super Bowl spot "The 100-Year Game," and "The Next 100," which won four Clio Awards according to prnewswire.com.
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