Rookie of the Year, Year One
The Sharpie Signature Combine
The brief
Sharpie S-Gel needed a place in sports that belonged to the pen and not to the league. Sponsorship inventory was available to anyone with a budget. A territory was not.
The idea
The first thing every professional athlete does is sign their name. The contract. The ball. The jersey. A kid's hat in the parking lot. In almost every one of those moments the Sharpie is already in their hand. Nobody had ever claimed that ritual, and it sat one step upstream of everything the category was fighting over. That was the door in.
The work
We built the Sharpie Signature Combine: a combine the athletes did not know existed, for the skill nobody trains. Rookies who had spent their whole lives preparing for the league were now preparing for the signature. The tone stayed sports-adjacent and conceptually tight, played straight enough that you almost believed the thing was real. Sharpie S-Gel was the hero product throughout, the pen built to hold up to a million autographs.
The cast
Two first-round picks carried the year. Michael Penix Jr., quarterback, Atlanta. Rome Odunze, wide receiver, Chicago. One rookie class, two cities, one pen.
Why it mattered
Year one had a single job: prove the territory could carry a campaign rather than a spot. It did. The signature turned out to be a place the brand could live, and the platform that followed it ran for three seasons off the ground this year broke.
The product's part in it
Sharpie S-Gel is the pen built to hold up to a million autographs, which is a durability claim nobody was ever going to read off a pack. Putting it in the hands of rookies at the exact moment durability becomes visible turns a specification into a demonstration, and it means the product is doing work in the film rather than appearing at the end of it.
If your brand has a piece of work in it that has not been made yet, we would like to hear about it.
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