A new job for a star QB helped New Era, Oishei Children’s Hospital and The Martin Group exponentially expand their reach.

Notte’s Notes

Even good neighbors need nurturing. Josh Allen, New Era, The Martin Group, and Oishei Children’s Hospital all share a city in Buffalo, but their collaboration on the Billustration campaign works more because of persistence than proximity. They’ve spent years getting to know each other, adapting to their needs, and learning what makes each of them work. Minimizing travel miles helps, but eliminating guesswork is this team’s strongest game plan.
Collaboration isn’t Mad Libs: [Athlete] works with [brand] and [agency] to help [charity] can be nominally useful to everyone involved. But if you want to start spinning that flywheel that Jim Collins described and the sports business world adores, find the partners and make the connections that earn others’ trust.
Go with what you know. New Era knows enough athletes and has enough regional connections to make Billustration’s charitable efforts work in multiple markets, but learned exactly how it would work—and how to navigate the logistics—by testing it on friendly home turf first. Worth considering before scaling.

Josh Allen, New Era, and The Martin Group all have roots in Buffalo, but their national and international reach is amplifying a local children’s hospital’s worldwide mission one hat at a time.

Buffalo Bills quarterback Allen has been a New Era partner since the team drafted him in 2018. After the Bills signed him to a six-year, $330 million extension in the spring, New Era determined it also wanted him on its team for the long term.

“When it came time for renewing Josh's partnership, we knew we had to do something different and special, because he has a lot of pretty incredible endorsements with global brands, and we are a global brand, but we are in his Buffalo hometown,” said Jesse Ladoue, marketing director at New Era, while sitting in front of Allen’s logo in his New Era office. “He had said to us on one of his recent production shoots prior to this agreement being refinalized. ‘I want a job.’ And we're like, ‘Well, you have a job, and it's a really important job,’ and he said, ‘No, I want, like, a job at New Era,’ so that was the beginning of this entire conversation.”

Director of Billustration

New Era not only gave Allen a title—”Director of Billustration”—but also an equity stake in the company. While Allen already appeared in ads for New Era products like its2025 Sidelines collection, a Bills logo that Allen hand drew during his time with New Era inspired the company’s 9FORTY Billustration Team Cap and a full campaign around it. The Martin Group produced a two-minute ad that documents Allen’s first months at New Era’s offices in Buffalo, where the company has been stationed for 105 years.

"Buffalo has become home for me and giving back to the community through my partnership with New Era means a lot," Allen said when the company announced his position in July. "The long-term partnership we have built over the years is personal. New Era has believed in me since I was a rookie, and I believe in the brand and where we are going.”

Going into the 2025 NFL season, Allen is the league’s reigning MVP, brought Buffalo to the world stage in London, and recently married his Oscar-nominated longtime partner, actress Hailee Steinfeld. New Era operates1,000 stores in 125 countries, employs ambassador athletes in the NBA and MLB, and sponsors global events including the Ryder Cup.

The Martin Group, meanwhile, has provided creative, public relations, digital, and media support to New Era for nearly 20 years while building a portfolio of clients that has included Under Armour, Puma, Nike, and Asics.

More Than Marketing

While it isn't unusual in sports marketing for an athlete, a brand, and even an agency to join together and help a charitable organization, in Buffalo it's a deeply personal affair. As part of the Billustration Team Cap rollout, Allen joined New Era and its partners at The Martin Group in a charitable campaign benefitingone of their mutual friends in Buffalo: The John R. Oishei Children's Hospital (OCH). New Era has servedas a hospital contributor since it opened in 2017, while The Martin Group counts its parent company, Kaleida Health, among its clients.

OCH isn’t new to Allen either. In 2020, he began making significant contributions to the hospital with help from Bills fans after the sudden death of his grandmother, Patricia Allen. With fans contributing $17 apiece as a nod to Allen’s jersey number, he founded the Patricia Allen Fund for the hospital’s critical care teams and established a recovery wing for patients in his grandmother’s name. The Billustration campaign became a natural extension of this, and has featured patients of OCH designing one new gameday hat for each of the Bills’ home games, which the team then auctions off—with 100% of proceeds benefiting the hospital.

Allen wore a hat before the Bills’ home opener and comeback win against the Baltimore Ravens that a five-year-old Myotonic Dystrophy patient named Jaxon designed, already having undergone 11 surgeries to treat the condition. Jaxon’s hat sold for $17,150 at auction. Allen’s Week 3 hat, designed by MaKenzieas she receives treatment for sickle cell anemia, took in $15,495. The two other hats made by patients this season drew a combined $12,600 in bids.

Allen entering the stadium for the Ravens game sporting Jaxon’s hat design

At OCH, Billustration serves as an extension of New Era and Patricia Allen Fund support that’s already paid for recovery wards and lifesaving equipment while drawing donations from well beyond Buffalo and the Bills Mafia. To Ladoue and New Era, the caps and auctions represent the first step of a five-year partnership with Allen. New Era is the official cap of the NFL, NBA, MLS, and MLB as well as an NHL licensee, and the company sees Allen’s role as an opportunity to help children’s hospitals in new markets and help athlete stakeholders contribute to and collaborate with New Era.

“In the off season, when we're thinking about new product collections and testing out features that are made for the sidelines of the NFL, you better believe Josh is going to be one of our first calls to test something out and collaborate with his teammates,” Ladoue said, pointing to a Bills dog-ear cap as an example of New Era products that could benefit from on-field perspective. “We can get that real-time feedback to put the best product available on the field of the NFL.

“Giving Josh this formal title allows us unprecedented access so we can build beautiful, effective, performance, products, not just for the athlete, but for every fan.”

Creating Josh Allen’s Office Space

Even with everyone in the same backyard, the logistics of this partnership were tricky. The team needed approval from Allen, the Bills, the NFL, New Era, the hospital, the patients, and their parents. And Josh Allen needed a real office.

While assembling the roughly two-minute launch commercial that, along with Allen and New Era’s social media, gave the campaign a broader audience, The Martin Group had access toNew Era's leadership team—including Ladoue, Mark Maidment (SVP, Brand), Steve Gallo (General Manager, North America), and Andrew Cianflone (VP, Human Resources) for eight hours in May. But they had Allen for only two. And he requiredbuffalo wings.

“Like 10 minutes before, someone from New Era was like, ‘Amy, we need to get 60 wings on set,’ and it was very specific what kind of flavors he wanted,” said Amy Pecoraro, SVP of creative operations for The Martin Group. “Originally, we did Bar Bill but that’s in East Aurora, so we moved it to Gabriel’s Gate [in Buffalo, closer to New Era’s offices] and said ‘don’t tell Josh, he’ll be fine.’ And when the wings came, he was so sweet and took half of them and gave the other half to the crew and everybody else.”

Much of the concept behind the Billustration ad remained secret until the day of the shoot. Michael Tsanis, The Martin Group’s SVP of creative, noted that New Era presented a handful of specific office scenarios—setting up his own office, drawing his logo, cutting a patch of office grass, tossing a pen into a piece of artwork—that his and Pecoraro's teams could build other scenarios around. They shot the scenes with New Era staff first and held Allen’s scenes for the two remaining hours at the end of the day, with Allen seldom in the same room.

They scripted out lines for Allen, but let him riff freely in many cases—having him fumble with pens and give a thumbs up to a thumbs-up statue.

Josh Allen outside his office at New Era

“We kind of had to do it ourselves: There's a small group of us who are involved, and it was a very covert operation to get all the sets in the actual offices at New Era,” Tsanis said. “Imagine how conspicuous it looks with a handful of us running through, lighting things, decorating things, propping up Josh's office.”

Both Tsanis and Percoraro said The Martin Group feels like an extension of New Era’s team after nearly 20 years in business together. Knowing the brand’s cap silhouettes, 32 NFL teams, retailers, regional accounts and fan preferences provides a creative advantage on set for minor details like last-minute cap changes. Ladoue noted that she’s worked with “dozens of creativeagencies” during her time at New Era, but The Martin Group’s knowledge of the company means “they're almost always our first call.”

Making an Impact

The spot appeared primarily on social media and online media channels, generating 128 million impressions on New Era and select media channels. Since they debuted the commercial, The Martin Group has also helped New Era and Allen publicize each new hat release by pitching national and local media—establishing a segment for each home game cap launch with Buffalo ABC reporter Michael Wooten.

Combined, the ad and social media posts from New Era and Allen featuring OCH patients who designed Billustration caps led to more than 560 earned coverage mentions through outlets including Good Morning America, The New York Times, NBC News, and CBS Sports. That’s generated more than 985 million media impressions to date.

“Teamwork isn’t confined to one place,” Allen said in a LinkedIn post announcing a hat that OCH leukemia patient Bryn designed. “We see it in stadiums when athletes and fans rally together, in hospitals when doctors and nurses unite for the benefit of their patients, and across the globe when communities come together to achieve something bigger than themselves.”

Why This Isn’t a Game

Dr. Stephen Turkovich was the founding Chief Medical Officer at OCH and has served as its president since late 2022. Each day, he walks by the hospital’s New Era Pavilion with restaurants, a television with a scoreboard, and New Era caps lining the walls.

Turkovich credits New Era with helping to tell the hospital’s story, but also amplifying it through the Billustration initiative with Allen.

“I’ve had the opportunity to meet him, make rounds with him, talk to him, and the most special times are when he's interacting with the kids, and you could tell that each interaction, he's fully present,” Turkovich said. “The youngest kids don't really know who he is, and so they're not really captivated by his sort of celebrity-ness, but they're captivated by the human being that he is, and I think that really demonstrates that he truly cares.”

OCH patients working on Billustration caps

When Turkovich looks at donations that come into the Patricia Allen Fund, he notes that many of the $17 donations come from beyond Western New York, New York State, or the United States itself—with New Era’s Ladoue noting that fans in the comments of Billustration social posts have asked New Era to bring the program to their town and help their local children’s hospital. In 2022, for example, Kansas City Chiefs fans donated nearly $500,000 to the Patricia Allen Fund after their team beat the Bills during the last 13 seconds of a playoff game.

“There are evolutions of [Allen’s] Billustration title that will manifest themselves in other ways, not just on the caps he's wearing, not just at OCH,” New Era’s Ladoue said. “It could potentially grow to include other cities, other initiatives, other partners, and this is just the beginning…and we just felt like this moment with OCH and these caps made the best opportunity to make a splash during the first year."

By amplifying the hospital’s local stories to a national and global audience in 2025, however, New Era, Allen, and The Martin Group have widened the field of donors and helped the hospital afford critical care staff, recovery wings, and vital equipment, redefining what it means to run a “local” campaign

Turkovich points specifically to the hospital's recent purchase of Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) machines to help critically ill patients as evidence of the Patricia Allen Fund’s impact. As New Era, Allen, and The Martin Group team with the hospital’s patients on more caps and auction donations, Turkovich sees the effort to ensure that no child ever has to leave Western New York for care as emblematic of Buffalo’s finer traits that echo far beyond its borders.