"Fans of Love" is a short film shot on the kiss cam at the NFL Pro Bowl in Orlando in January 2017. The big screen picked out couples in the crowd as usual, but this time the people sharing a kiss, a hug or a dance included same-sex couples, interracial couples, friends with Down syndrome, a mixed-race family and a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting. It was released just before Valentine's Day 2017 as part of the Ad Council's Love Has No Labels campaign, with a simple message: love looks like many different people.
The video circulated widely as an "NFL ad". The league did take part, but the film was made for a public service campaign. Here is what it showed, who was behind it, and why the familiar kiss cam was such an effective place to say it.
What the video showed
The film opens like any stadium kiss cam. A heart-shaped frame lands on what looks like a man and a woman, the crowd cheers, and then the man turns and kisses the man sitting beside him instead. From there the camera moves through a series of pairs and groups:
- a heterosexual interracial couple;
- a lesbian interracial couple;
- two friends with Down syndrome who share a hug;
- a racially mixed family;
- a lesbian couple, one of whom wore an "Orlando survivor" T-shirt;
- a husband and his partner who uses a wheelchair.
Between the kiss-cam moments, some of the people speak briefly about their relationships. The film runs about two and a half minutes and is set to the song "Show Me Love" by Hundred Waters.
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
The original upload is no longer available on YouTube. Copies of the film can usually still be found online by searching for Love Has No Labels Fans of Love.
Who made it
The film was the third chapter of Love Has No Labels, a campaign by the Ad Council, the American non-profit that produces public service announcements, created with the agency R/GA. For this chapter R/GA partnered with the NFL, which gave the team access to the stadium screen.
It was filmed on 29 January 2017 at Camping World Stadium in Orlando during the Pro Bowl, the league's all-star game. Two production crews, one from the NFL and one from the production company Tool of North America, used nine cameras to capture the crowd. According to the campaign, the crowd's reactions were unscripted, and only one member of each featured couple or family knew they would appear on screen. R/GA's Chris Northam said the team had "four minutes to get three minutes of footage."
Why Orlando mattered
The location carried extra weight. Seven months earlier, on 12 June 2016, a gunman killed 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. Including a survivor of that attack, kissing her partner in front of a stadium crowd in the same city, turned a light-hearted stadium tradition into a quiet statement about resilience.
One of the people interviewed in the film summed up the campaign's idea: "Love is about who you are, not what you are."
The idea behind Love Has No Labels
The campaign launched in 2015 with a film shot in Santa Monica, California, in which pairs of skeletons danced and embraced behind an X-ray screen before stepping out to reveal who they were. That film became the first public service announcement to win an Emmy and has been viewed hundreds of millions of times.
The aim is not to lecture but to prompt people to notice their own assumptions. The Ad Council has framed it around implicit or unconscious bias: quick judgments about others that most people make without realising it. A kiss cam is a perfect test of that, because the audience makes an instant guess about who is a couple, and the film then gently shows how narrow that guess can be.
The campaign has received tens of millions of dollars in donated media since 2015, and each chapter has used an everyday setting rather than a studio. Placing the message in a stadium, among football fans who came for a game rather than a lecture, let it reach an audience that might never seek out a video about diversity.
A short history of the kiss cam
The kiss cam began in California in the early 1980s, when baseball stadiums started using giant video screens and needed something to fill breaks in play. It spread to basketball, hockey, football and concerts, and became one of the most recognisable rituals of a night out at a game.
Because camera operators pick people based on how they look, the kiss cam has always relied on assumptions about who is together. It has produced plenty of awkward moments, such as siblings mistaken for a couple, and some viral clips have turned out to be staged. That reliance on snap judgments is exactly what "Fans of Love" played with.
Consent and the camera
A kiss cam moment is fun when everyone is comfortable, but nobody owes the crowd a kiss. People may be colleagues, relatives or friends, may not be out publicly, or may simply prefer privacy. In this film the featured couples and families were arranged in advance, although only one person in each knew the camera would find them, so the surprise was real.
The broader takeaway works off the screen too: a smile, a wave or a shrug is a perfectly good answer to the camera, and there is no single way a loving couple, family or friendship has to look.
Sources: Campaign: Ad Council uses Pro Bowl kiss cam to challenge bias for Valentine's Day; Sports Illustrated, 15 February 2017: NFL's 'No Labels' kiss cam ad; Wikipedia: Kiss cam; Love Has No Labels (official campaign site).
COMMENTS