NFL 2026 Moment Engine
Adobe's NFL sponsorship had always worked the same way: buy a media placement, put the product next to the game, and hope the audience notices. It wasn't moving the needle. Ahead of an official brief, with deadlines closing in, I started building a different pitch: one where the moment a fan feels watching a game becomes something they can hold, personalize, and pass around themselves, using capabilities Adobe already owned, not new media dollars.
The idea, which I called the Moment Engine, started from a simple gap: a fan's excitement over a big play has nowhere good to go beyond a blurry screenshot of the TV. My pitch flipped that: a branded card celebrating the moment appears on the fan's phone before they're even done celebrating, they personalize it with their own trash talk, send it to the group chat, and their friends click through to make their own version. To keep the card, they create a free Adobe Express account: one tap, and the growth mechanic the whole pitch was built around. That account gate traced back to a freemium talking point our CEO had raised earlier that year, outside any brief; I worked it into this pitch as the specific mechanism that would convert NFL fans into new Adobe users at scale, for free.
None of it needed new infrastructure; the NFL already runs its own instance of Adobe Journey Optimizer. The pitch pointed Firefly, holding a single on-brand look designed once, at that existing instance to personalize and push out thousands of cards automatically, all season. That let the pitch reframe the ask: redirect media spend Adobe had already committed, rather than request new sponsorship dollars, toward something built to sign people up instead of just serving impressions. And because it ran end-to-end on Adobe's own stack, it doubled as a live proof point for the customer-experience story Adobe tells its biggest CX customers: a Journey Optimizer instance already paid for and installed, capable of far more than the customer running it knew to ask of it.
The pitch landed immediately with Adobe's Sports Marketing team, and they're now presenting it directly to the NFL to gauge appetite for bringing it to life. Where it goes from here isn't up to me, but the strategy, the mechanic, and the pitch itself are: built without a brief, ahead of a deadline, because the idea was worth chasing before anyone asked for it. Peter Chase collaborated with me throughout, helping refine the thinking, editing the pitch decks, and crafting the film narratives after a brainstorm session we ran together.
Credits
John Caponi / Senior Creative Director / Concept, strategy, and creative direction; developed the Moment Engine mechanic and the freemium growth strategy ahead of an official brief
Peter Chase / Writer and Editor / Refined pitch thinking, edited decks, crafted film narratives following a brainstorm session
Alejandro Chavetta / Adobe Executive Creative Director / Management support
Tyler Jump / Adobe Brand Strategy
Full Pitch Deck
