Signing Tony Raymond
Cultivate an audience for an indie football movie for sports fans and beyond.
Background
Signing Tony Raymond follows a young college football coach sent to rural Alabama to sign the nation’s top high school defensive end, only to find himself navigating rival recruiters, eccentric townsfolk, and the recruit’s wildly dysfunctional family in a series of humorous misadventures. The film features Michael Mosley, Mira Sorvino, and Rob Morgan in leading roles alongside appearances by NFL alumni Marshawn Lynch, Brian Bosworth, Champ Bailey (also serving as executive producer), and Charles Esten. Jackie Kay portrays the title character, Tony Raymond, anchoring the story in heart and humor.
Our team launched a full discovery effort, evaluating positioning opportunities and audience behaviors to determine how to frame the film in a way that builds early fandom and drives ticket sales. This included qualitative and quantitative research with college football fans and general moviegoers to assess interest in the working title and early creative. From our research, we determined 2 things: we needed a more ownable name and the key art needed to invite a larger audience beyond just football fans. We needed to broaden our audience pull and make fans of the movie outside of just sports enthusiasts.
Services Provided
- Brand Identity
- Campaigns
- Content Creation
- Digital Design
- Naming
- Research & Strategy
- Video & Animation
A New Title
During our discovery phase, we challenged the original film title, Signing Day, by testing it with both football fans and non football fans. The results showed that while the title was familiar, it felt generic and failed to spark emotion or curiosity beyond the sports audience. We proposed and tested an alternative title, Signing Tony Raymond, which immediately outperformed by creating intrigue and prompting a simple but powerful question: who is Tony Raymond? Audiences leaned in, expressing curiosity about the character rather than the event. By leading the filmmakers through this side by side testing, we helped them confidently select a title that generated stronger emotional pull and broader appeal, and they were thrilled to see the data validate the creative shift.
Key Art & Website
With the name change, Headword worked to change the key art to better reflect the essence of the film and capture the wide cast—from Marshawn Lynch to Mira Sorvino along with many others—that would help draw the attention to a broader audience rather than limiting it to football fans only. By showing more peaks into the story of the movie, Signing Tony Raymond finally had permission to go outside of a typical football fan demographic and capture adjacent audiences to see the film.
Headword also designed and launched the movie’s official website, ensuring the entire digital ecosystem aligned with the refined positioning.
Social
In addition to the title, key art and website, we wanted to promote the movie on social. Social channels were revamped to match the new name, branding and messaging and a variety of social content under defined social pillars were created including trailer cutdowns, clips featuring the stars of the movie (including Marshawn Lynch), featured cast, release dates, BTS footage, appearances, and much more to help grow the audience on social before it ever hit theaters.
Results
After growing an audience including football fans and movie goers, premiering in film festivals, debuting in theatres all over the country and guests appearances and publicity on a variety of media outlets, it's safe to say that 'Signing Tony Raymond' was a dream come true. Now playing in select theaters. Go to SigningTonyRaymond.com to get tickets.