Super Bowl hospitality provider On Location Experiences is getting into the sponsorship sales business, and its first client is the 2018 Minnesota Host Committee.
On Location, which the NFL owns a piece of, says it will sell the national sponsorships that bring in some of the tens of millions of dollars that will be necessary to operate the 2018 Minneapolis Super Bowl. That means On Location, through its commission, will get a cut of those funds, and by extension the NFL too. The agency is hiring a head of sponsorship, at either the vice president or senior vice president level, who’ll be based in New York and report to CEO John Collins.
 |
Super Bowl Live is central to the week leading up to the game.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
|
On Location will also stage Super Bowl Live, the downtown football festival that is now central to operating the week of the NFL championship game.
Super Bowl Live “is a big budget,” Collins said. “As part of that commitment we will be selling national sponsorships for the host committee.”
The host committee has already sold most of the local sponsorships.
Collins is creating a company that’s quickly expanding beyond its core as a packager of tickets with hotel rooms for the Super Bowl, into other parts of the week. On Location bought an event company, Nomadic Entertainment, which staged several of the bigger parties this past Super Bowl. And last year the league gave On Location 6,000 more Super Bowl tickets to package, bringing the total to 9,500.
Now it has a piece of staging Super Bowl week in key aspects of the host committee’s operations.
The moves come as On Location — which in addition to the NFL is owned by Bruin Sports Capital, Redbird Capital Partners and Jon Bon Jovi — begins to centralize its operations in New York. On Location is building a premium hospitality sales team in New York that will have about a dozen members, Collins said, including two senior executives.
“We are now recognizing there are other ways, better ways of organizing a business, better ways of redeploying our resources,” he said.
Currently, On Location and its related companies have about 325 employees. Two hundred and fifty are through Anthony Travel, the college hospitality provider acquired in 2016. An additional 40 are through acquired event firms, and On Location itself is about 35.
When the New York buildout is complete, the total headcount should top 350, Collins said. A handful of layoffs will occur at Dallas-based Anthony Travel because it handles some of the sales that Collins is moving to New York.
Having a premium call center would allow On Location to begin large group sales to the Super Bowl long before the game, and not leave it as exposed to the vagaries of the matchup.
A requirement for the senior sales job, Collins said, is it is “someone who has built an outbound call center.”
On Location tapped executive recruiter Prodigy Sports to handle the search for the senior positions for sponsorship and premium sales. Those hires may be announced as soon as this week.
On Location’s core business is the Super Bowl, but it also services other NFL events including the draft and the international games. The company also expects to compete for business outside of the NFL.
