The Children’s Place Puts Eli Manning at the Center of Goofy Spring Brand Campaign

How do you get Eli Manning to do an ad for your brand during one of the busiest times on his post-retirement calendar?

If you’re The Children’s Place, you make clothes his kids already use, have headquarters 3 miles from his old workplace at MetLife Stadium, and tell him he can bring his old New York Giants and National Football League friends along for the shoot.

“It’s for The Children’s Place, which is a household name, and it’s an opportunity for me to do something with my kids, which I never really got to do before,” Manning told Adweek. “Also working with some former teammates and great friends of mine—one was a teammate of Peyton—getting our kids involved with something around Easter and kind of a funny idea at the big Easter egg hunt/football game, I thought it was just gonna be a lot of fun.”

Maegan Markee, svp of marketing of The Children’s Place, noted that the former Giants quarterback and his team already had a lot of fans at the company’s headquarters in Secaucus, N.J. They reached out to Manning informally and, once he said yes, began working internally on a campaign that surrounded him with his former Giants lineman and “one of my best friends in the world” Shaun O’Hara; his Super Bowl 42 and 46 teammate Justin Tuck; his brother Peyton’s Super Bowl 50 wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders; and his former Philadelphia Eagles rival Brian Westbrook.

The spring- and Easter-focused campaign felt like a good fit for Manning, a father of four, because “my kids use the products and I bought the clothes.” Markee said Manning’s presence also made sense for The Children’s Place’s core customer: millennial mothers.

“There is a huge opportunity to appeal to women through sports, and it’s really untapped,” Markee said. “We’ve done a lot of work over the past two years in the marketing organization to really get to better understand our customer base. We know that football and professional sports are really important to our mom—football brings families together, this is what they look forward to, and it helps build a bond.”

As marketers look for the most effective ways to use sports marketing around tentpole events like the Super Bowl and star athletes consider the best use of their brand equity, finding a partnership that fits becomes even more crucial for all parties involved.

While it helps to have a celebrity whose stature matches a brand’s ambition, that star’s values, cultural context and even home address all go into creating a proper fit.

Brands in demand

Manning’s availability isn’t always a given around this time of year. In 2022, he was featured in Super Bowl-centric spots for Lay’s, Stella Artois and Caesars Sportsbook. This year, he’s already been called up by Verizon for its social media campaign and joined Peyton to promote the Pro Bowl for the NFL. 

“I seem busy but you’re not as busy as when you’re playing football because it was every single day—you really say seven days a week,” Manning said. “I was in the facility from pretty much August through hopefully February; I knew where I was gonna be every day and your schedule is basically set for the next six months. Now each day, each week I have a different routine, and what I do from this Monday to last Monday is very different.”

Manning noted that while he’s still required to travel a bit, he’s not constantly on the road and generally has his weekends to himself, his wife and children—who are now ages 11, 9, 7 and nearly 4. It allows him to be one of the most ubiquitous faces in sports marketing without keeping his old NFL schedule, but it also presents an opportunity for brands within a half-hour radius of his New Jersey home that align with his post-football life.

“[I] try to do things with the Giants or do commercials in New Jersey at home and with teammates and friends and include families,” he said. “I still try to involve a lot of people and do things a little closer so I can be home for dinners, I can help take kids to practice, I can coach some of my kids’ sports teams and really be a part of my kids’ [lives] at these great ages.”

The Children’s Place also finds itself striking a balance after spending much of the pandemic engrossed in a brand renaissance. It relaunched the bankrupt Gymboree brand online and in Children’s Place stores in 2020, started its tween brand Sugar and Jade at the end of 2021, and enlisted Khloe Kardashian, Kris Jenner and other influencers to help debut its pajama-focused PJ Place last year. 

This year, The Children’s Place took a look at the consumer base of its flagship brand and the women who comprise 87% of the associates the company employs, and opted to make a big statement while choosing the correct tone. Manning, his former Giants teammates and their fellow NFL alums were valuable to the brand not only as former athletes, but as fathers, family members and philanthropists. 

“They’re so connected to our core consumers and our brand mission on so many levels, including sending really positive influences to children and their communities,” Markee said. “That’s really important to us at The Children’s Place, so when we were concepting this campaign, they were really the perfect fit.”

Home field advantage

Set in Manning’s suburban home and backyard, the spot features Manning giving a G-rated version of a Tom Coughlin pep talk to his pastel- and gingham-clad friends and their similarly styled children just before an Easter egg hunt. While the hunt itself is meant to highlight the versatility of the chain’s spring line—more formal choices for holiday breakfasts, durable layers for sugar-addled backyard play—Markee said she was more taken with the interaction between the athletes, their kids and their surroundings.

O’Hara uses a full broadcast studio sound setup to interview a stuffed rabbit. Westbrook carries a child around on his shoulders. Manning pulled his two youngest kids out of school for the day to film the spot.

The Children’s Place got Manning to pitch in with some basic direction, asking his friends to act a bit and give him funny looks during his opening pep talk (“they’ve done that before, so they didn’t have to act too much”). As O’Hara, Tuck and Emmanuel giggled while Manning went off script during some of the initial takes, the athletes’ kids gave The Children’s Place what may have been the performance of the day.

“The kids stayed very focused there,” Manning said. “They listened, they knew what they had, and then it’s like they blocked me out completely—like kids do to their parents—and they never broke character. But a few of the dads definitely needed a moment.”