In the only recent year that Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs were not playing in the Super Bowl, the NFL star was driving around Los Angeles in early February with his business managers, André and Aaron Eanes. They were marveling at billboards featuring Dwayne Johnson, the actor and entertainer better known as the Rock. “Man, I don’t think I’ll ever be as famous as the Rock,” Mr. Kelce said. His co-managers looked at each other and said, “Yes, you can,” André Eanes said.
Mr. Kelce’s managers have a window of time between the ending of the Super Bowl in February and the beginning of training camp in July in which their plan for the Kelce brand must unfold. Once the season starts, Mr. Kelce manifests what he wants on his own.
The NFL star has a growing team that includes a creative strategist, a community outreach coordinator, a Los Angeles-based publicist, a personal chef and a trainer. He has four football agents, led by Mike Simon at VMG. In the spring, he also became a client of Creative Artists Agency to feed his budding acting itch.
This sudden conquering of the zeitgeist has taken even die-hard football fans by surprise. The reality is that most of his ascent has been years in the making — the result of a carefully manicured business plan developed by the 34-year-old Eanes brothers that blossomed at precisely the right moment. This was a year even The Rock might envy. Mr. Kelce, a tight end, won the Super Bowl in February. In March, he hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He’s starred in seven national television commercials. The podcast he co-hosts with his brother, Jason, is among the most popular on Spotify. He launched a clothing line with his team and he’s dating the world’s most famous pop singer.
Travis Kelce’s sudden shift into a more mainstream form of celebrity was planned out before he met Ms. Swift. However, the doubling of his prospective audience — from mostly men between the ages of 18 and 49 to a far larger group bolstered heavily by Ms. Swift’s female fans of all ages — has changed the calculus for where the plan goes from here. The awareness of Travis is much larger and with an even broader audience. His managers have gradually laid the groundwork for his path to the A-list. Throughout 2022, his manager had targeted endorsement deals with companies that were not traditional NFL partners — like promoting vaccines for Pfizer, for instance, or a new debit card from Experian. The purpose was to build out Mr. Kelce’s résumé as a stand-alone pitchman, rather than yet another interchangeable player in a commercial for one of the NFL’s partners. His manager adopted marketing lessons from Viacom after 14 years, working with music artists like Harry Connick Jr., who was constantly willing to reinvent himself to reach new audiences.