How the Kansas City Chiefs’ plan to hook the youngest sports fans

Sports fandom used to be a no-brainer for young kids—you rooted for the team your parents did.

Now, with children growing up on social media, where they can easily come across athlete and team content from anywhere in the world, friendly family feuds over fandom could become commonplace. The Kansas City Chiefs marketers sure hope so.

The team, which has been working for the past few years to facilitate a global fandom, is now turning its attention to youth, with a new animated series on YouTube starring mascot KC Wolf singing short songs.

It’s the Chiefs’ first time experimenting with kid-focused content, and Lauren Denowitz, VP of brand marketing and fan engagement, told us using KC Wolf as a conduit for reaching pint-sized fans is a strategy she plans to build out further.

“You’re doing sports marketing often without your products,” Denowitz told Marketing Brew. “It’s very hard to get time from the athletes, especially when yours have elevated to the level of global pop star that ours have…Not everyone has KC Wolf that is as beloved and as exciting as he is, and so really the way I think about him is [to] let him be the 54th man on the roster.”

Sing-along

The series, KC Wolf Jamz, dropped with two episodes on May 30, with additional episodes rolling out each Saturday in June, going live at 10am CT to mimic the Saturday-morning cartoon schedule, Denowitz said. The episodes are less than a minute each, “just long enough to give you enough of a tune to get stuck in your head,” she said.

The songs were created in partnership with the entertainment agency fable.works, and the target audience is primarily 8- to 12-year-olds. That’s because youth is one of the “softer areas” of fandom for the Chiefs, Denowitz said, according to a report conducted by the league around the time she joined the team last year.

Since the Chiefs’ marketers position the team as a “pretty nationally beloved brand” and since about three-quarters of fans live outside the team’s home market area, the tunes aren’t hyper-KC focused, Denowitz said. Instead, the episodes are occasionally loosely football-themed: Episode 1 is about jerseys, Episode 2 focuses on barbecue, Episode 3 introduces KC Wolf’s friends, and Episode 4 encourages kids to dance.

“You could learn something about the Chiefs’ world without necessarily pushing the Chiefs,” Denowitz said.

For now, the series consists of six song installments, but Denowitz said the creative team came up with some other concepts outside of musical content, “which are probably in the pipeline for the future” assuming the initial effort goes over well. To track success, Denowitz said her team is looking at engagement and view-through rates of the videos, as well as conducting in-person focus groups with kids.

And KC Wolf Jamz released around the same time as the Chiefs’ new Spanish-language scripted comedy show, El Offseason, so the team is also tracking YouTube subscriber growth driven by both series.

A house divided

As Gen Alpha kids form their sports fandom, Denowitz said KC Wolf offers a way to draw them to the Chiefs both online and in person. The mascot shows up at community events like birthday parties, and he even has a birthday celebration of his own, which is not uncommon for a mascot these days.

“It’s now about, ‘How do we put him in the middle of content, in the middle of brand activations?’” Denowitz said. “We have this…opportunity to reach these fans who live nationally, and content is the easiest way to do that, so I think that he’ll play a pretty significant role in our content conversations.”

The Chiefs have their own entertainment studio, Foolish Club Studios, and Denowitz, who joined the team after leading the internal film and TV studio at AB InBev, said she hopes the social content with KC Wolf might one day lead to something like a full children’s show on a streaming service.

“We want everything we do, whether it’s actually music or not, to kind of be an earworm—something that just sticks around,” she said. “Parents hopefully will say, ‘We hate the Chiefs for introducing these songs, because my kids don’t shut up and don’t stop singing them.’”

And in a perfect world, those kids will become Chiefs fans.

“The thing that I would love the most is Little Tommy goes to school singing the song, and his friend, whose parent is an Eagles fan, starts singing it back,” she said. “There you go, now you have a house divided.”