If you’ve heard of Taylor Swift, you’ve almost definitely also heard of her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. It’s a publicity dream for the football team, and one that could never have been planned. Nonetheless, Lara Krug, the team’s first-ever chief marketing officer, has been tasked with turning the Chiefs into, in her words, “the world’s team,” and she’s leveraging the ripped-from-a-romance-novel love story between Kelce and Swift, the team’s so-far stellar regular season record (currently the best overall in the NFL), their Super Bowl three-peat quest, this week’s premiere of a Chiefs-themed Hallmark Christmas movie, and more to ensure it happens.
“Some things in life can’t be scripted, but you can certainly take the opportunity and run with it,” Krug recently told Vanity Fair in a bar high above Times Square.
Since joining the Chiefs organization in 2021, Krug—who has experience at Anheuser-Busch InBev, L’Oréal USA, and Avon—has been focused on raising the team’s profile on a global scale. Is Krug counting on that winning record and high-profile romance to spike the metaphorical marketing football? No, but she’s not not using those fortuitous facts to her advantage.
“I wish them nothing but absolute happiness in their lives,” she said, measuredly, while noting Kelce and Swift have brought new eyes to the team. Remember: The first time Swift showed up at Arrowhead Stadium, sales of Kelce’s jersey reportedly spiked by a whopping 400%. That’s one of those things you certainly can’t script.
What can be scripted, however, is a movie. The Chiefs organization collaborated with Hallmark for Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, a feature-length tale of love and conflicts of business interests between a multi-generational Chiefs fan (her) and a Chiefs fan engagement employee who tends toward the Grinchy (him). There is eggnog, there is a magic hat, there is a sudden understanding of the Meaning of Christmas And Also What It Means to Really Love the Chiefs, and there is, of course, a happy ending. The movie premieres on the Hallmark Channel on November 30, the day after the Chiefs play the Oakland Raiders, a game that will stream live on Amazon Prime on Black Friday, another win for Krug and her team. It also has the potential of being two days of programming that will satisfy across sectors of extended families gathered for the holidays. The couches don’t even know what’s coming for them.
The idea for the movie, Krug said, “started with our Chiefs playoffs campaign last year.”
“We created this idea that the playoffs [are] the best holiday of the year,” she said. “It has a lot of the tropes of all the other holidays. People dress up, they eat too much, there’s fireworks—all the pieces. The postseason as a holiday campaign came to be and in it, riffing off of the cultural relevance of last year of love stories and romance and all the things, we thought, what better way to tell a holiday story than a holiday movie?”
In January the organization released the Hallmark-coded trailer for the made-up movie Falling for Football, and after the Super Bowl win, the Chiefs’ second straight, Hallmark (which is, serendipitously, also based in Kansas City) came a-calling to take what had been a casual social media flirtation to the next level and make things official.
“We had a meeting with them and at the end of the meeting, we all looked at each other and they were like, ‘So, would you want to make it a movie?’ And we were like, ‘We’ve been waiting for you to ask.’”
The surge of interest in the NFL, and the Chiefs in particular, after Swift became a fixture in the VIP suite can’t be ignored. Krug has an eye toward serving that new wave of female-skewing, more casual fans. Still Krug says that she personally has not met the singer (“I love from afar, and she’s wonderful,” she said), and that the organization is extremely careful when it comes to their high-profile fan. (Representatives for Swift did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)
“We consider her a part of Chiefs Kingdom,” Krug said. “We respect her as a fan, we respect them as a couple in their personal lives. We have tried very hard to be really thoughtful on her experience. So we, last season, never played her songs in the stadium. We never showed her on our screens. I know media was obviously showing her, which is out of our control, that’s the networks that are showing her. We tried to be really respectful of her as a fan. Hopefully she saw that as a way that it was a welcoming place for her to come back in. What she has done so beautifully is brought a spotlight to the sport, and to fans, and to a fan base that maybe was never as considered as one of our priority target audiences.”
And with Krug and her team’s fan-first mentality, “It’s our responsibility to make sure that all these new fans that have come into the fold for her, for [Kelce], for Coach [Andy Reid], for Patrick [Mahomes], for a million other reasons, that we provide opportunities back to them that make them want to stay.”
