Kelce is joined by his Chiefs teammate Chris Jones to fix the Sunday-night blues.
On Sunday nights in the fall, once the football games are over, NFL watchers face a harsh return to reality. The so-called “Sunday scaries” aren’t unique to football fans, of course, but when Sunday is your favorite day, the sudden arrival of the workweek does seem particularly cruel.
DirecTV, though, has found an unexpected way to send you off to slumberland without a care in the world on Sunday nights—with help from Travis Kelce, star tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.
The TV provider’s work with Kelce—which began with a TV spot a month ago—continues with “Sack the Sunday Scaries,” an audiobook of 11 sleep tracks available online and on Spotify. Each track is a kind of bedtime story, from a mix of ASMR-like relaxation tracks to amusingly boring mini-histories relating to football.
Kelce reads seven of the stories, while his Chiefs teammate Chris Jones handles the other four. The video below introduces the project.
“One of DirecTV’s superpowers has always been live sports. That means football fans are hugely important to us,” said Ryan Buckley, creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles, which created the campaign. “We realized that while we do a great job of taking care of fans on game day, we couldn’t help them on game night, when that final whistle blows and they’re staring down the barrel of another workweek.”
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Creatively, TBWA had a lot of freedom to try offbeat stuff for the project. For example, after the album’s initial track (30 seconds of Kelce explaining what you’re about to listen to), the second track is seven minutes of Kelce saying the word “bruh” in different inflections, over a bed of atmospheric music.
Elsewhere, Kelce tells stories full of arcane knowledge about the minutiae of football—how footballs are made, for example, or how stadiums take care of their grass.
“We tried to toe a delicate line,” Laura Dickie, senior art director at the agency, said of the subject matter for the tracks. “We wanted them to be about subjects boring and mundane enough that they would actually put people to sleep. We also wanted them to be informative, and teach football fans obscure facts about the game they probably didn’t already know. And lastly, we wanted to sprinkle them with funny moments, to make nervous football fans smile—with or without their retainers in.”
Jones, a defensive tackle for the Chiefs, reads his stories with a voice that is actually more naturally soothing than Kelce’s.
“We’re so used to trying to fit so much into 30 or 15 seconds that the ability to go full tilt on such a fun concept for five or more minutes with such amazing talent was a blast,” said Mark Winters, agency creative director. “Once we came out of our rabbit hole of research on these topics, the scripts were a breeze. It was truly some of the most fun we’ve had in a long time.”
The penultimate track is the oddest of all. It’s 10 minutes of Kelce softly blowing a whistle—somewhat akin to cicada-like white noise.
The campaign extends to ludicrous merch as well, such as a 6-foot-5 Travis Kelce body pillow and a “pajersey” (pajama-jersey) for fans to wear to bed. Fans can enter to win those items via a four-week sweepstakes at SackTheSundayScaries.com.
A Travis Kelce body pillow and a “pajersey” (pajama-jersey) are available via DirecTV’s sweepstakes.
“Our filter is always whether something makes us laugh—and a life-sized body pillow of Travis Kelce is the dictionary definition of something that never fails to make us crack up, even now,” said Buckley. “That speaks highly of DirecTV to extend the trust in us to take some big, kind of silly swings with the understanding that’s the type of thing that stands out now and makes audiences’ ears perk up.”
The results might not end up being quite as critical acclaimed at Squarespace’s classic sleep tapes with Jeff Bridges (which got a 7.8 rating on Pitchfork), but it’s a fresh idea in the saturated world of NFL marketing. And Kelce is always a draw for fans, as the anxiety over his injury scare this week proved once again.
Paid media on Instagram and Spotify will drive users to the playlist. Influencers will also be posting about it, including another Kansas City Chief who’s ridiculously perfect for the campaign—Drue Tranquill.
Check out Kelce’s earlier spot for DirecTV below.
