A single Sunday football tune-in campaign now requires roughly 350,000 marketing assets across teams and channels — and the NFL says AI is the only way to keep up.

That figure, cited by Adobe Enterprise CMO Rachel Thornton, illustrates why the league deepened its partnership with Adobe into a second year focused on producing personalized content at international scale. The stakes are visible in the season's early numbers: the Los Angeles Rams–San Francisco 49ers game in the first week averaged 18.5 million live viewers, fewer than the 25.1 million who watched the Seattle Seahawks face the New England Patriots on opening night. But the Rams–49ers game was played in Australia, a first for the league, which has emphasized international audience growth in recent years.

"Our fans are expecting us to engage with them in ways that are relevant, in ways that are timely, and in ways that are tied to what's happening in the moment," said Chi Ogbuehi, the NFL's VP of marketing technology and consumer products. "To deliver that value at the speed of need that our fans are expecting, our traditional, manual processes can no longer sustain that."

The two organizations worked together for more than a decade before formalizing an official partnership last year, according to Ogbuehi.

Building the content machine

About four years ago, the NFL began centralizing data from all 32 clubs into a proprietary database to better understand its fanbase, Ogbuehi told Marketing Brew. Other sports organizations, including MLS and the NWSL, have made similar fan-data efforts in recent years.

Adobe then helps the league put that data to work by building "content supply chains and experiences" that produce, personalize, and distribute hundreds of thousands of assets for platforms like social media, Thornton said.

The scale has changed dramatically. "Once upon a time, a single campaign…maybe required a couple thousand assets," Ogbuehi said. "By the time you factor in…different languages, variations, different types of experiences, [for] a campaign that typically would have required about a couple thousand assets, now we're looking at hundreds of thousands of assets."

To push out that volume, the NFL built an "AI-powered content ecosystem" it is currently piloting with teams. The ecosystem lets marketers use Adobe products, including a self-serve tool that creates different versions of a marketing asset based on approved templates, Ogbuehi said.

Personalization with guardrails

League and team marketers can also build personalized content from fan profiles assembled from information across platforms, Thornton said. She pointed to her own son as an example: a teenager in Seattle who is primarily a Seahawks fan but also follows the 49ers and many other teams and players for his fantasy league. As a Gen Zer, his football viewing experience runs heavily through social media.

"The NFL and their teams understand that, especially for that younger demographic, it has to be [a] multi-platform, multi-screen" experience, Thornton said. "All of those touchpoints matter, and they differ from person to person."

Personalization stops at team boundaries. The NFL's content ecosystem uses a "zero-trust visibility model," meaning marketers from different teams cannot access each other's work, Ogbuehi said.

As the league's following grows worldwide, its marketers aim to deliver content that still feels individually tailored to each fan — a task that makes AI tools increasingly integral to NFL marketing.

"It starts with understanding the context of that fan relationship," Ogbuehi said. "Who is the fan?...Understanding the context of the relationship allows us to better deliver more relevant experiences to that fan."