Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift make all the fans sigh with their fairytale romance, and Kelce seems to have learned a thing or two from the queen of Easter eggs, as his latest Pepsi ad sneakily features a subtle Swift reference.
Taylor Swift is famous for leaving subtle notes for her fans throughout her work. A self-described “Mastermind,” she started leaving secret messages in her projects when she was as young as 15! She told The Washington Post, “When I was 15 and putting together my first album, […] I decided to encode the lyrics with hidden messages using capital letters. That’s how it started, and my fans and I have since descended into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.” She used to capitalize the lyrics in the booklets in her albums, and the messages led to decoding what some songs were about or other exciting details. Over the years, the messages got more complex.
As Swift has been dating Kelce for over a year, the two have shared multiple iconic moments in the past 360+ days since they started their rom-com-inspired romance, and Kelce proved every time that he’s taking notes and is able to match her freak, becoming everyone’s Roman empire. Because of that, we applaud his sneaky Swift reference.
Travis Kelce combined his Swiftieness with a major pop-culture reference
Before he was Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce was also a certified Swiftie. Over the years, he has shown his love for her songs (ahem, “Blank Space”) and he became an even bigger fan as he attended her Eras Tour shows throughout 2024.
To kick off the 2024-2025 season, Kelce was cast in Pepsi’s “Make Your Gameday Epic” campaign, a new retelling of its 2004 Super Bowl campaign “Roman Empire.” Instead of an all-pop star lineup, the new version featured Megan Thee Stallion as the Empress, and a couple more NFL stars: Buffalo Bills’ quarterback Josh Allen, Baltimore Ravens’ running back Derrick Henry, and Minnesota Vikings’ wide receiver Justin Jefferson.
The ad takes actors Lamorne Morris and Jake Lacy on a journey from a bar waiting for the game to start to a journey in the center of a gladiator arena, and ends with Kelce on a screen during a press interview saying, “Are you not entertained?”
Fans of the 2000 Gladiator film, which has a sequel set to premiere on Nov. 22, remember that “Are you not entertained?” is one of the most iconic lines from the historical epic, Academy Award-winning film starring Russell Crowe. As “Make Your Gameday Epic” is a retelling of “Roman Empire,” also based on Gladiator, the reference is very on the nose.
However, it also comes with a nod to Swift herself. On Dec. 6, 2023, Taylor Swift was named Time‘s Person of the Year, which included a lengthy interview with the “Anti-Hero” superstar. Speaking about her marvelous 2023, the singer, who kicked off the billion-dollar The Eras Tour, premiered a concert film of it in theaters, and also released two re-recordings of her past albums in order to own her masters, noted that it was “the proudest and happiest” she’s ever felt, ending the quote with the resounding question: “Are you not entertained?”
The interview was also the first time Swift addressed her relationship with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end, which makes his reference even more lovely. Of course, this could all be a coincidence and Travis Kelce might’ve only referred Gladiator — but what if he didn’t?