As Highmark Stadium opens its doors, the workwear brand launches a beautifully crafted ode to the construction crews, turf suppliers, welders and more who helped bring it to life, taking Carhartt into sports marketing through the “loading dock”, reports LBB’s Addison Capper
Before the Buffalo Bills can take to the field at the new Highmark Stadium, Carhartt is celebrating the people who built it.
For this instalment of its ‘Made Possible’ campaign, the workwear brand is building on a multi-year partnership with the Buffalo Bills to mark the completion of the team’s new stadium, celebrating the workforce – from construction crews and turf suppliers to the welders making the uprights – who helped bring it to life. More broadly, ‘Made Possible’ shines a light on the skilled tradespeople that make some of America’s most important shared experiences possible.
“The work is really what brought us to Buffalo,” says Norma Delaney, vice president, marketing and brand creative at Carhartt. “Highmark Stadium is the only professional stadium opening this year, and a generational infrastructure project of this scale is essentially a monument to hard work. Buffalo itself is a hardworking, proud community that also aligns with Carhartt’s DNA.”
The opportunity also allowed the brand to enter the world of sports via a less typical route. “From a broader business perspective, most brands enter sports marketing through the front door by sponsoring star athletes or putting logos on jerseys,” Norma says. “We wanted to enter through the ‘loading dock’, if you will. Partnering with the Bills gave us a great canvas to showcase how hard work literally builds one of our most iconic shared cultural experiences – football.”
Created with Unreasonable Studios, the campaign is fronted by a 30-second film, ‘Making Football Possible’, which rewinds from the completed game-day experience to reveal the hard work and grit that led to it.
The campaign began last year with Carhartt focusing “on the sheer effort of building the venue itself” before eventually evolving into ‘Making Football Possible’, a celebration of the fruits of all that hard work. “We wanted to flip the traditional sports narrative,” Norma adds. “By rewinding from the roaring fans and kickoff back to the seats being bolted down and the turf being rolled, we visually dismantle the final product. It reminds people that game day only exists because of the hardworking people who bring it to life.”
Alongside the hero spot, the campaign digs deeper into the people and businesses behind the stadium through a series of beautifully shot, two-minute documentary style films.
Two take the campaign beyond Buffalo, visiting Carolina Green, the family-owned farm that supplies natural grass to NFL stadiums across the country, and Aluminum Athletic Equipment, where skilled welders manufacture the uprights used at multiple NFL venues.
Other films return to Highmark Stadium, where Bills legend Thurman Thomas showcases the work of his commercial construction company, 34 Group Inc., which was responsible for installing the venue’s seats. Thurman also gives current Bills running back James Cook III his first tour of the completed stadium, which is meant to symbolise a passing of the torch from those who built it to those who will now play there.
“Authenticity is so fundamental to our brand,” Norma says of the stories. “What really stood out to me was the nice moment we captured on film between Thurman and current Bills star running back, James Cook III. Thurman took James through the stadium, explaining all the hard work his company and other contractors poured into it. Seeing James come away with such a deep, genuine appreciation for the workers that built his stage was incredibly special.”
The ‘Making Football Possible’ hero spot and longform films featuring 34 Group, Carolina Green and Aluminum Athletic Equipment were directed by Max Henderson via Daydream Studios, while the separate Highmark Stadium tour was directed and produced by Mac Cappuccino, with Steven Ungureanu as director of photography.
The campaign will also extend into Highmark Stadium itself when the Bills play their first preseason home game on August 15th. The first 20,000 fans will receive Carhartt rally towels printed with the names of every member of the crews that worked on the stadium. Carhartt will also use in-stadium messaging throughout the Bills’ preseason games to pay tribute to the workers behind the new venue.
The brand describes ‘Making Football Possible’ as part of a broader community-first marketing approach, which prioritises “gratitude to the workforce” over its “own corporate logo”. Norma says the utilisation of the rally towels is a perfect example of this methodology in practice.
“Instead of using that marketing real estate to just print the Carhartt logo, we chose to invest in printing the actual names of more than 5,000 construction crew members on 20,000 towels for the fans,” she says.
Carhartt also took over local billboards in Buffalo strictly as a ‘thank you’ to each of those workers. “For us, investing our budget means elevating the people who show up early, stay late, and never ask for credit,” Norma adds. “We’re just giving them the spotlight they’ve always deserved.”
While the completion of Highmark Stadium brings this chapter of ‘Made Possible’ to a close, Norma believes the wider brand platform has sturdy foundations on which to build.
“‘Made Possible’ is a platform with incredible depth and breadth,” Norma says. “It allows us to shed light on the trades on a macro level, providing a consistent thread across all our grassroots efforts. We will always look for the next opportunity to tell the story of what the trades make possible, whether that's on a massive national stage or a small, local community level.”
- - -
See more breaking creative here.
Read more from Addison Capper here*.*
SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER
SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER