CenturyLink x NFL "Come Together"

"Come Together" is a CenturyLink film made with the NFL, directed by Rick Wayne. Sports culture meets brand storytelling, with connectivity moving at the speed of the game.

A telecom brief and a league partnership are two different masters, and the film has to satisfy both without becoming a compromise between them. The telecom side wants an abstraction made tangible. The league side arrives with its own visual grammar, its own rights constraints and an audience that knows the sport better than any brand does. The common ground the film finds is speed, treated not as a network specification but as the thing that makes a stadium of people react at the same instant.

The film is one of the earliest pieces in Wayne's selected commercial work, published in December 2019, and it belongs to the stretch of his career that ran through Los Angeles before he moved to New York. The films around it from the same period, Intel "Connectivity" from March 2019 and the Wiz Khalifa trailer from April, show a director already working across scale and register in the same year.

Sport becomes a recurring world in the work rather than a one off. The Rookie of the Year platform for Sharpie, a three year run built around NFL rookies and the ritual of the first signature, starts five years after this film. Wayne names sport directly when he describes the range he builds for: babies, fashion, love, sport, each project a different world built for that brand.

This is the director's cut, and it runs 0:25.