“Why don’t you go get some coffee while us men talk business?” a creative agency head in the Dominican Republic once said to Marissa Solis. Twenty-three years old at the time, Solis had just started as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble Latin America. The first account she ran was Downy, the fabric softener brand, and as she walked into a meeting between P&G and a marketing agency, those words greeted her. She responded, “I’m running this campaign.”
Solis, who is now the senior vice president of global brand and consumer marketing for the NFL, was 10 years old when she left Mexico to come to the U.S. with her sister and mother. Growing up, she wanted to be president. “It took me a while to realize I couldn’t do that,” she laughs. So, she turned her attention toward becoming a U.S. ambassador. Solis has yet to climb that specific mountain; instead, she stands atop the world’s wealthiest sports league, responsible for every major TV and film ad it produces.
In February 2023, according to Sportico, the NFL was raking in $19 billion in annual revenue. During the 2021–2022 season, according to Standard Media Index, the NFL generated $4.43 billion in ad revenue for its U.S. media partners. And per the NFL Players Association, the league infuses $5 billion each year into the economy.
Solis won’t reveal specifics about the NFL’s marketing budget. Besides, it’s not a typical spend and certainly not a standard method. “Our marketing model is not about a traditional value exchange. Access is the name of the game. The value of the NFL’s intangibles is incredibly high. The love of the game is a currency that we share with creators, influencers, celebrities, partners, and more. We offer access to games, access to IP, access to players, access to unbelievable experiences. In return, the league gets access to a whole new generation of fans. It allows us to work in ways that haven’t been done before and uncover real creativity and innovation.”
The NFL has reached a new audience so far this season with the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce relationship, as the league’s social media has seen some 200 million video views on content related to Swift and Kelce. Solis recently spoke on an Advertising Week panel to debunk the idea that the relationship was league-generated.
“People think that we may have had something to do with it,” she said. “Absolutely not. We knew nothing. We knew what you guys knew and followed on social media. Travis went to her concert, asked her to maybe come to a game. We had no idea that she was going to show up. And once it happened, she showed up to a game and in an instant, literally in a second, it’s viral. Luckily, we have an incredible team of specialists working to promote it across league social channels.”
After that memorable P&G meeting and running the Downy brand, Solis took over campaigns for Pampers, Tide, Always, Bounty, and Charmin in Latin America. She later transitioned into working on political campaigns, then spent three years at Deloitte Consulting. In 2003, PepsiCo recruited Solis back to marketing to be the assistant brand manager for Tostitos. After running branding for Ruffles and Lay’s and innovation for the company’s core brands, Solis shifted to sales. “Marketing at PepsiCo is the thing—people don’t leave and go into sales,” she says. But Solis did. She turned her experiences into leading the upstart of PepsiCo’s Hispanic business unit, which covers every state in the food and beverage businesses and has seen double digit sales and market share growth among the Hispanic population.
In 2021, Solis joined the NFL. From her DFW home base, she leads marketing efforts, including the amplification of the NFL’s broadcasting partnerships with Amazon Prime (a $13 billion deal running through 2033) and YouTube TV (a $2 billion per year deal running through 2030.) “We have to ensure [our streaming product] is successful,” she says. “It’s educating consumers, driving subscriptions, and crafting the big awareness ads, stretching all the way down the funnel.”
Solis helped score the first multi-week advertising campaign on the innovative new MSG Sphere. The Las Vegas music and entertainment arena is the world’s largest spherical structure and displays ads on the sphere for a reported $450,000 a day. The campaign promotes the NFL Sunday Ticket.
Solis also drives new fan growth, which includes growing participation and viewership in youth, women, Hispanic, and LGBTQ communities. Looking ahead, she aims to tap into international markets. “My job is to build the NFL’s brand globally,” she says. “Establishing branding in Mexico is different than in England, and it’s different in Asia and Africa. But it’s my task to grow those fan bases over time.”
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