L.A. Rams go full Hollywood in NFL Draft brand campaign

Two months after they ruled the Super Bowl, and just ahead of the NFL Draft, the L.A. Rams are going big. This week, the team debuted a blockbuster, celebrity-studded trailer starring Dennis Quaid, Josh Holloway, Scott Eastwood, Tyrese Gibson and a host of Rams players. But this isn’t your typical sports plug—it’s a heist-style film about “stealing the draft.”

In “On the Clock: the House Always Wins,” the Hollywood stars step into the roles of key Rams leaders: Quaid plays L.A. Rams Owner/Chairman E. Stanley Kroenke; Holloway is General Manager Les Snead; Eastwood plays head coach Sean McVay; and Tyrese Gibson is defensive coordinator Raheem Morris. The film’s heist plot sees Kroenke and Snead steering members of the Rams family, including Aaron Donald, Matthew Stafford, Cooper Kupp, Kendall Blanton, Van Jefferson and many others in key roles as “Oceans Eleven”-style operatives gearing up to infiltrate the draft in Las Vegas.

The trailer aims to drum up attention for the Rams brand ahead of the draft, but according to Lexi Vonderlieth, L.A. Rams VP of brand strategy, it also helps to underscore a unique aspect of the sports team. “Any marketer gets excited when you find things that are different about your brand, and the draft for us, is a really big part of that,” she said. “It’s really tied to true insight of who we are as a team and what makes us different, the way Les Mead and Sean McVay approach the draft. Les Mead does his trades innovatively and differently, there’s been so much conversation about that, good and bad, but it is what makes us different and we stuck to it and proved the success of it.  We wanted to take that as an idea and market it.”

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The film was created in-house by the L.A. Rams' marketing department alongside Ventureland, the entertainment offshoot of commercial production company Prettybird, the independent creative studio founded by Kerstin Emhoff and Ali Brown, partners of top commercial production firm Prettybird, and award-winning producer John Battsek (“Searching for Sugar Man,” “One Day in September”). The film was directed by Prettybird co-founder Paul Hunter, with cinematography by three-time Oscar winner Bob Richardson (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”).  The Rams’ marketing team worked with Ventureland Executive Creative Director Mike Rosen and Executive Producer Natasha Wellesley to develop the script.

The film was shot over multiple days in Los Angeles, including the scene of the Rams’ Big Game win at SoFi Stadium as well as the new Rocket Mortgage Drafthouse in the Hollywood Hills, a posh Hollywood home that has been converted into Mead and McVay’s draft headquarters from April 28-30.

The idea spins out of the first draft house last year, which had been located in Malibu.  “Draft House was a physical activation that we brought to life based on the fact that we just do things differently,” she said. This year’s location works in lockstep with the trailer. “This becomes another piece of, how do you make a film that feels Hollywood?”

Going “Hollywood” also meant recruiting the trailer’s big-name stars to play figures such as Mead and McVay. “We wanted it to be a head fake,” said director Hunter. “In the beginning, you feel like you’re watching a [real] trailer for a minute, and once you see the players, you realize they’re talking about football, and then, the draft.”

As for directing the NFL talents who had to put a new “acting” hat on, Hunter said he treated that process as if they were football plays. “It was basically just getting them to be themselves,” he said. “With Stafford I would say, ‘This is a really tight game, and go to the feeling when you’re in a huddle and you’re saying, hey, we’re down and we need a touchdown. What’s your vibe when you go into that?”

“On the Clock” will run on the L.A. Rams’ digital and social channels and in cinema, kicking off an off-season brand campaign running through the draft, the NFL's schedule release, ticket sales pushes and other key moments leading to the start of the 2022 NFL season. It will also include other movie-style promotions such as the film posters seen here.