Jim and I recently attended Super Bowl XLIV in South Florida. The NFL is a client of VM Foundry and we were happy to take part. We all think of the Super Bowl as the biggest football game in the world but it is also one of the largest marketing events of the year. Most people recognize the sports marketing angle of the game but may miss out on the leisure travel aspects. Physically attending the event provided a unique perspective into the powerful tourism opportunities generated by the Super Bowl and similar sporting events. It was immediately apparent that the bulk of attendees were not from the nearby area, but rather had traveled long distances and were making serious investments to attend.
The Tampa Bay Business Journal reported a number of findings which I found stunning:
- The Sports Management Research Institute stating that 112,000 visitors spent $280 million during the week preceding the game.
- PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP estimated the Super Bowl would generate about $195 million in tourist spending.
- Key estimates include an average household income of $222,318 for Super Bowl visitors.
In addition to sponsorships and traditional ad sales, the NFL and South Florida travel groups engaged in wide-ranging marketing programs that utilized their web-presences as trusted sources of information. The NFL connected with attendees by creating extensive resources on their site, including a travel guide, stadium details, transportation information and accommodations booking services. Careful optimization of these pages for search engines led to top five results on key terms.
VM Foundry was proud to support those efforts in partnership with the NFL by creating the Official National Football League widgets which have been downloaded over 160,000 times and the Facebook application which blends our strategic and creative skills with a solid business case for future sales.
Attending the Super Bowl and then following up with some light research, I quickly saw that through careful optimization and quality content creation, both the NFL and South Florida travel groups recognized the potential economic impact and were able to capitalize on a huge wave of positive PR surrounding their sports marketing event.
And...I definitely want to go next year in Dallas.
