Meet Tom Brady’s Hollywood Marketing Machine: Shadow Lion

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.

The buzzy Hertz commercials? That was them. The Emmy-winning series Tom vs. Time? They worked on that, alongside Religion of Sports, 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.)