Case study

My Cause My Cleats

Four organisations aligned in six weeks to put three young designers' work on an NFL Black Friday broadcast.

Microsoft · Best Buy Foundation · Caleb Cares Foundation · NFL and the Chicago Bears · FY26 · a six-week programme to a fixed broadcast date

Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams holding two custom painted cleats beside his face, one sky blue and one orange
Caleb Williams with both worn designs: Hypnos's, created in Minneapolis, and Bella's, created in New York, both inside Best Buy Teen Tech Centers.

The problem

A national cultural moment with four organisations holding four different definitions of success, a broadcast date that could not move, and teenagers' creative work at the centre of it.

My mandate

I identified the opportunity, built the partnership framework, and coordinated the mentorship programme and the cross-channel media activation. The campaign's own production and broadcast teams carried delivery.

The call

Design the proposition so each partner's win reinforced the others, and keep the students' voices at the centre so the campaign stayed authentic enough to earn its reach.

What changed

16.3M
viewers via the NFL Black Friday broadcast on Amazon Prime
$450K
earned media value generated
$250K+
partnership-equivalent value
3
Teen Tech Center students through a six-week design mentorship

Sources: FY26 programme records; Achievements and Impact Record; Programme case study, on file.

What survived the handover

The athlete relationship, an activation model reused for the partnership's next cultural-moment flagships, and a signed set of cleats auctioned for the Foundation the following summer.

Hypnos smiling while preparing red masking tape for a cleat design inside a Best Buy Teen Tech Center
Hypnos at work on the Minneapolis design inside a Best Buy Teen Tech Center.
Bella leaning over a workbench, hand painting a design onto an orange cleat
Bella hand painting the New York design: Think Kindness, the anti-bullying idea the campaign carried to sixteen million people.
Custom painted cleats worn on a football pitch, one sky blue design on foot and an orange pair beside it on the grass
On the turf during the NFL's My Cause My Cleats window: Hypnos's design worn, Bella's beside it.

The NFL’s My Cause My Cleats campaign gives players a platform to spotlight causes they care about. Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams wanted his platform to carry anti-bullying and youth empowerment through his Caleb Cares Foundation. I saw a way to make that concrete: connect him directly with Best Buy Teen Tech Center students, and let their designs carry the message.

Four organisations had to align for that to happen, each with different priorities: Microsoft on brand and product integration, the Best Buy Foundation on youth development and programme integrity, Caleb Cares on cause authenticity, and the NFL and the Bears on broadcast coordination and league compliance. The framework I built gave each partner a win that depended on the others succeeding, which is what kept four approval processes moving inside six weeks.

The exchanges themselves were specific. Microsoft’s in-kind social marketing and storytelling elevated the athlete’s brand and his foundation’s profile. For the Best Buy Foundation and its students, the exchange was access: one-to-one mentoring from design and marketing experts across Microsoft’s portfolio, on the designs and on telling their own stories. Internally, the campaign returned measured media and marketing value, brand visibility, and the brand love that comes from genuine mission alignment. Surface devices in the designers’ hands connected product to story, and the organic Surface content that came back, shot by the partner’s own production company, arrived in-kind with pass-through rights, part of the return on the nonprofit investment. That is how the model builds value: every partner takes away something worth more to them than what they put in.

The centre of the activation was a mentorship, not a media plan. Three designers, Bella in New York, Hypnos in Minneapolis, and Nevaeh in Los Angeles, worked through a structured design process with Microsoft designers: brainstorming, concept development, sketching, refinement, and final production, using Copilot to unblock creative problems along the way. The cleats they designed were worn on the Bears’ Black Friday game, streamed globally on Amazon Prime.

I coordinated the media activation across the partners’ channels, including the sizzle film that followed the students from sketch to broadcast. The campaign reached 16.3 million viewers and generated $450K in earned media value. The value equation is what made it repeatable: earned media and brand visibility worth well above what the activation cost to execute, delivered inside six weeks. The better measure sits underneath those numbers: three young designers watched a national audience see a world they drew, built on respect and empathy, and the programme proved that authenticity and reach are the same investment, not a trade.