Meet Tom Brady’s Hollywood Marketing Machine: Shadow Lion
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Well before NFL star Tom Brady retired from professional football, his off-field legacy was beginning to take shape through a business that’s grown from a handful of people dedicated to optimizing the quarterback’s social media opportunities to a multidimensional creative studio with about 20 employees across the country.
The company is called Shadow Lion, and it was founded in 2017 by a core team including Brady’s longtime manager Ben Rawitz, Jeff Fine (who happens to be Rawitz’s brother), and Gilad Haas who previously worked for Brady’s New England Patriots teammate Julian Edelman. The firm is one of a few celebrity founded marketing agencies — think: Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort — that have cropped up in recent years.
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The buzzy Hertz commercials? That was them. The Emmy-winning series Tom vs. Time? That too.
But in the years since the creative studio was founded to advance Brady’s off-field endeavors, they’ve expanded well beyond the lion’s shadow, so to speak. They’re focusing on audience-specific content, whether that’s a 10-second social clip or a 30-minute docuseries, and aspire to be a household name when it comes to creating standout creative work, similar to what A24 is doing in Hollywood. They’ve built a roster of clients including some of the biggest brands out there, like Pepsi, Hasbro, Under Armour, Aston Martin, Meta, Peacock and the NFL, and have worked with elite athletes like JJ Watt, Zdeno Chára and Mookie Betts.
“When you see a Shadow Lion project, whether it’s a campaign for a brand, or a film, TV or audio project, we want it to be synonymous with quality,” says Haas, Shadow Lion’s managing director. “We want people to seek out the things we’re producing because they’re fans of the creatives we have and the content we produce.” (With multiple yet-to-be-announced original content projects in the pipeline, they’re well on their way.)
Rawitz, Fine and Haas talked with The Hollywood Reporter about how Madden 2018 sparked the launch of Shadow Lion, why “ego is the enemy” and where the company is headed next.
How was Shadow Lion formed?
Ben Rawitz: I’ve been working with Tom Brady for the last 15-plus years. It was an operation of really just me, Tom, and his agent. We needed some extra help in Tom’s world as social media was growing and my brother Jeff was graduating college at that time. Jeff came on in 2013 to support Tom, myself and everything else that was going on.
Jeff Fine: For a couple years there we were just helping build Tom’s presence on social media, which was just Facebook at this point. In general, people like Tom were gaining control over their story and these channels were growing. There were a lot of opportunities to work closely with brands. Gilad was working with Julian Edelman at the time and a mutual friend introduced us. We had seen some of each others’ videos and immediately hit it off. It was a no-brainer to figure out a way to work together. That was really the birth of the idea of starting the company. We were all interested in a creative career and in building something.
Rawitz: There was a natural progression on the deal side with athletes in general, not just Tom, where athletes’ social media were becoming part of deals. Companies and brands wanted to own a part of social media, which was great because the athlete can use their own voice and make it more authentic. So it was a win-win.
Gilad Haas: Within the first couple months we had an opportunity beyond Tom’s social, and maintaining that organically, to work with a commercial partner in EA Sports. They were launching Tom on the cover of Madden 2018. They weren’t entirely sure how to announce it, but they knew they wanted to do something special and to take advantage of Tom’s momentum and growth on his social channels. We ended up producing two pieces of content for them with Tom in 45 minutes and they became Tom’s highest engaging branded content thus far. It set off a light bulb for Tom and for us that there was an opportunity here to create really high-quality and engaging content, and ensure that time-on-task for talent is incredibly efficient. It was a catalyst to us formally creating Shadow Lion in August of 2017.
Why go beyond Tom? Because his business alone would be enough for you guys to keep busy.
Haas: As we were working more in Tom’s world, we were coming across other athletes and brands who were familiar with the work we had produced without knowing we had produced it. It just kind of seemed like a natural next step for us. We felt like we had the bandwidth to do more, and there were new opportunities for us. As storytellers, there is an innate curiosity in all of us at Shadow Lion, and I think that curiosity can’t be fed through working on Tom-exclusive projects. The opportunity to branch out was going to be something that fueled us and created some fulfillment beyond what we were doing day-to-day for Tom.
Rawitz: There was also a shoot with Uggs, I remember. They had spent months on end trying to come up with a concept that would fit for Tom and they were paying a big agency. Ultimately it was like, “Hey, can you guys concept some ideas?” Because we know Tom, and at that point we had a great understanding of Uggs, we were able to come up with some great ideas and use Tom’s time-on-task. I think we saw that there’s a need for this kind of internal, almost from the athlete’s perspective, storytelling.
Fine: We have had an interest from the very beginning in growing as people and as creatives and have interests outside of sports. We see how growing different creative experiences can help enrich the work that we do with Tom. It’ll help us grow the team, help us produce at a high level. It is, in a way, as simple as that: We want it to grow.
How has Shadow Lion grown since then and what does the business look like today?
Haas: At the beginning it was kind of exclusively oriented around Tom and his world. There are three main arms of our business now. There’s the agency side of our business where we continue to support Tom across his off-field opportunities and we work with elite athletes and entertainers and other figures in a similar capacity. We’re the social agency of record for a couple of large brands, and we do social strategy and execution as one-off projects for large brands. Then the other side of our business is original content, ideating, developing, packaging, producing and executing on unscripted, scripted and audio content.
Sandwiched between those two arms, agency and original content, is our production team. That’s really enabled us to handle everything internally. When you’re working in the digital marketing landscape and original content, being able to move fast and ensure the quality and end product is what you want it to be is super important. The ability for us to handle a lot of that production internally has really benefited us in our growth.
What do you consider some of your biggest success stories so far?
Rawitz: To me, the biggest success is the people here at Shadow Lion and the vibe in the office. Everybody gets excited about coming to work every day. It’s one of the best environments I’ve been in. So, to me personally, it’s the people in this family at Shadow Lion.
Fine: I would definitely echo that. We’ve really built a team that cares about each other as people and it extends to the work. The through line is just the relationships. It’s nice to have that as a baseline in everything you do. We want everything we work on to be the best it can be and that really carries through and drives our growth as people and as a company.
Haas: We talked a lot about Tom’s social media for obvious reasons. What we’ve demonstrated there was the biggest proof of concept that we needed to show other folks what we were capable of doing. [Tom is] one of the most transcendent generational athletes, also known for extreme privacy and eliminating distractions on the field, and being able to create a consistent, creative and engaging social presence for him is something that we all have taken pride in.
EA Sports has brought us back every single year pretty much since that inception project that we did with Tom, helping them announce their ratings week or helping them with in-game content in Madden 23 this past year with Chad Ochocinco. We did a doc series on Zdeno Chára, who was captain of the Boston Bruins, that was on Peacock. Being able to follow him for two years and tell his story helped us really set a foundation for everything that’s to come and reinvigorated the whole team. There’s Team Impact, which is a charity that pairs chronically ill children with athletic programs at colleges and universities and makes them official teammates of those teams. We’re going be taking on a larger role with them, and we’ve been able to see that what we produce has materially affected kids’ lives.
Echoing Ben and Jeff on the culture at Shadow Lion, the ability to go into work every day and never have the Sunday scaries, to support your teammates and treat everybody with respect is something that I think is rare. It doesn’t really matter who came up with the idea. For us, ego is the enemy and our goal is to create a space for creatives to thrive.
What do you see for the future of the company?
Haas: We’re super excited about for what’s to come. I outlined the three buckets for us, as far as what we do between original content production and agency work. What we’re really excited about is to scale all three of those and maintain the quality of work. We have some fun and exciting opportunities on the agency side that we’re really excited about to continue to grow that team. We look at the scripted space as an opportunity that we’re excited to dip our toes into next year, and the audio space is a big one that we plan to make a move into toward the end of this year as well.
[Internally], it’s to continue to build a space for creative talent and people to come and flex their muscles and maybe skip some rungs in the ladder and produce really great quality content at a high level and not necessarily have to go through the bureaucratic process that some legacy agencies or bigger companies might have as part of their formal process. We’re excited to open new locations in new cities and hopefully appeal to talent in those locations. The goal is really for us to grow our team, maintain our culture, maintain our quality and continue to cement Shadow Lion as a brand known for quality storytelling, quality content, quality creative and quality people.
Is there anything else about Shadow Lion that you really want people to know right now?
Fine: One note just to build on what Gilad was talking about; I think from the very beginning we’ve seen this as a space for people and for creatives to thrive and grow. It’s not lost on us how fortunate we are to get the opportunity to create and have our work seen. We’re all sports fans since we were younger, and to be able to put out content with Tom, for instance, around some of these amazing moments that are just so emotional and wonderful is an amazing opportunity.
Something we realized early on, or at least I know I felt, was that any of my friends could be doing what I’m doing right now. They just don’t necessarily have the opportunity, and I think that runs through a lot of what we do. We feel like people can, if given the opportunity, really put out amazing work. Putting people in positions to succeed and have opportunities to do their best work, and the support system to do it, is central to everything we do. Some of my proudest feelings around the company are seeing how the people here have grown in just the last few years and thinking about the trajectory of that growth. It happens with every project and we’re constantly making bets on ourselves that are a little outside of our comfort zone because we believe we can do it. That’s always paid off for us because we believe we can rise to the occasion and we tend to. More people can do this type of work than tend to get the opportunities, and it’s cool to have the opportunity to do so.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
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