SBJ Football: NFL Looks To Keep The Celebrations Going

The SBJ crew in Miami next week is me, John Ourand, Terry Lefton and Abe Madkour. We’ll all be landing in South Florida on Tuesday, so let us know if you have an event we should put on our calendars, or if you’d like to get together. On a personal note: I know most of you are experienced veterans, but this is my first Super Bowl and I’m not ashamed to say I’m pumped.

EXPECT MORE NFL ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS IN 2020

• The yearlong NFL 100 campaign is wrapping up, but the league isn’t done leveraging the milestone. Next season, the NFL and the Pro Football Hall of Fame will celebrate the actual 100th anniversary of the league's founding in mid-September, said VP/Special Projects Pete Abitante. The HOF’s special Centennial Class will likely be enshrined that week instead of during the regular festivities in early August, he said, anchoring a week’s worth of celebration.
  
  
• On the actual anniversary -- Sept. 17 -- the HOF and city of Canton expect to dedicate Centennial Plaza, a massive installation in downtown that celebrates every player in NFL history. Conveniently, Sept. 17 is a Thursday, so expect “Thursday Night Football” to have a 100th anniversary theme. “We’re working with the Hall of Fame to see if we can -- whether it’s our network or Fox -- do pregame and halftime shows from Canton,” Abitante said. But this won’t get anything close to the promotional push NFL 100 did. The NFL’s top priority in the early season is a proper opening to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.
  
  
• The NFL 100 campaign was a rousing success, Abitante said, and will influence the league’s social media tactics into the future. Every announcement included video clips specially cut for all different social media platforms and pushed out simultaneously, leading to extraordinary engagement on programs like the NFL 100 All-Time Team. “There was a social component to just about everything we did, in a broad, aggressive way, going through the whole ecosystem from team to league to players, that’s all going to be something that continues on,” Abitante said.
  
  
• Other key wins from NFL 100, according to Abitante: The Huddle for 100 community service push cleared 200 million hours of community service organized by the league and teams, more than doubling the original target. For context: that’s about 83,300 work weeks. The Dolphins exceeded 30 million hours alone, Abitante said. One of the last NFL 100 activations comes at the end of Super Bowl LIV, when either a Chiefs or 49ers fan will press the button on the confetti cannons at Hard Rock Stadium.

CONTENT IS KING FOR 49ERS, CHIEFS

• Fans of the Chiefs and 49ers have an insatiable demand for content right now, and marketers from both teams are working long hours to take advantage of the Super Bowl appearance. In Kansas City, the team just cleared five million social followers, and clicks on their recurring video series, “The Franchise,” as well as regular podcasts “Defending the Kingdom” and “In the Trenches” (all sponsored), have been through the roof. “The measurement on that content has not grown a little bit -- they’ve had double-digit, in some cases triple-digit, gains in the past few weeks,” said Chiefs Exec VP/Business Operations Tyler Epp.
  
  
• 49ers CMO Alex Chang: “They want every piece of content I can push out, so we have to continue to feed that need.” The Niners’ crew took some slight chances with superstition by having playoff-themed content ready to go before they actually advanced each week. Starting with their razor-thin win over the Seahawks in Week 17, the 49ers had social and digital features about the next step online within seconds of that game and each playoff game’s conclusion. It wasn’t secret work, but it was on a "need to know" basis. "We involved who we needed to do, and no one else,” Chang said.
  
  
• The Niners are hosting official viewing parties in San Francisco, San Jose and Santa Clara for the game, and sponsor United Airlines will host a fan rally for a team send-off on Sunday. In K.C., there are no official team-sponsored fan events, Epp said. But as Epp puts it, there’s no need to get in the way of the “awesome groundswell of authenticity” that comes along with the team’s first Super Bowl appearance since the Beatles broke up. “There’s going to be 100 local watch parties, and none of them should be official, because they all are, and we really rely on our local sponsors and media partners to carry those.” Grocery sponsor Hy-Vee is getting a ton of traction with a seven-foot-tall Patrick Mahomes bobblehead they’re carting from store to store.

A popular attraction at K.C.-area Hy-Vee stores has been a 7-foot Patrick Mahomes bobblehead

CALIFORNIA FANS PLAYING CATCH-UP ON TICKET BUYS

• Fans from California are closing the gap in Super Bowl LIV ticket purchases compared to their counterparts in Kansas and Missouri, according to the most recent data from Ticketmaster. On Sunday, 32% of sales came from Kansas/Missouri vs. 25% from California. But since Sunday, it’s been roughly even, with 21% from Kansas/Missouri and 20% from California. The early gap last Sunday may have been driven by the Chiefs -- who haven't been to the Big Game in 50 years -- punching their ticket to Miami before the 49ers by around four hours.
  
  
• In terms of high-end ticket buys, Chiefs fans are still outpacing 49ers fans. Super Bowl ticket buyers from Kansas are currently purchasing more premium club seats -- specifically The 72 Club at Hard Rock Stadium -- than California-based fans (10% of tickets vs. 2%). Chiefs fans also have spent an average of 22% more on lower-level tickets. Ticketmaster is also seeing California-based fans having a slightly higher overall average ticket price than Kansas/Missouri-based fans ($8,748 vs. $8,639). This is driven by more 200-level club seat purchases by West Coast fans (15% vs. 9%) despite Kansas/Missouri fans purchasing more lower level and 72 Club seating (50% vs. 37%).
  
  
• Overall, sales shifted more toward lower-level seats once the matchup was established (47% in the lower level since Sunday vs. 41% previously). 

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Bloomberg's inaugural Power Players Summit kicks off the Big Game weekend in Miami on Friday, January 31. During this half-day event, 49ers President Al Guido, Dolphins Owner Stephen Ross, Mavericks CEO Cynthia Marshall, Jaguars LB Najee Goode and top business leaders will convene to discuss the multibillion-dollar sports industry. Join us to get firsthand insight into the opportunities and challenges of investing in sports, the trends that will disrupt and dominate the game, how business leaders are capitalizing on industry changes, and more.

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TAMPA COMMISSION HEADS SOUTH FOR PREP WORK

• Raymond James Stadium will host its third Super Bowl in 2021 (the fifth for Tampa), and next week, Rob Higgins and his team at the Tampa Bay Sports Commission will make the four-hour drive south to check out what Miami is offering as it hosts the Big Game. Tampa's turn in the rotation came in a unique way -- chosen to replace L.A. for Super Bowl LV amid construction delays on SoFi Stadium.

• Higgins, a 2016 SBJ "Forty Under 40" honoree, spoke with SBJ's Thomas Leary about what he's looking for his team to take away from South Florida next week. "There’s no better planning tool than getting a chance to witness an event firsthand prior to hosting," he said. "We’re focused on taking as many notes and pictures as possible.” Higgins specifically will focus on the experiences of three different groups: fans, teams and the media. His main priority among those groups is to identify "ways to further enhance the potential memories that every Super Bowl attendee can create." The Tampa contingent is still finalizing details for its schedule next week, but Super Bowl Opening Night at Marlins Park, the Super Bowl Experience fan event and NFL Honors dinner are among the can't-miss items.
  
  
• One area where Higgins will look to promote the 2021 game is on Radio Row. The commission has teamed up with WTSP-CBS radio in Tampa for a segment on Radio Row to "give people a deeper behind-the-scenes perspective" on what Higgins and his team have seen in Miami and how they're preparing to bring the best of what's being offered back north. Higgins and WTSP this morning also launched the "Tampa Bay 55" weekly podcast series, and broke some news like Amalie Arena serving as the site of Opening Night for Super Bowl LV. Buccaneers co-owner Bryan Glazer made an appearance on the podcast and talked about what it means to land the event once again. "It is a tremendous sense of pride for our family. It's also a sense of gratitude to the other owners who have trusted us and respected us enough to honor us with that vote, and we've worked very hard behind the scenes to get that done."

Raymond James Stadium will host its third Super Bowl next year

SPEED READS

• With the Raiders now officially in Las Vegas, the 49ers have the Bay Area to themselves. The N.Y. Times’ Ken Belson explored this golden opportunity in a story titled “The Raiders Left Oakland. The 49ers Want To Take It.” The Niners brass didn’t love the story, bristling at the idea that they’ll try to poach Raiders fans. But nobody thinks you can turn a diehard Raiders fan into a 49ers faithful that easily (that’d require a personality transplant, in my experience.) But to the extent Northern Californians are in play -- think young kids, newcomers or casual fans -- the 49ers are putting their best foot forward.
  
  
• The AP's Barry Wilner went deep on Roger Goodell, tracking how the commissioner early in his tenure "stood first, far above his peers." But in the years that followed, Goodell has made "some very ill-advised decisions," and he has "been failed by his investigative forces in several cases." And yet, league revenue "skyrocketed from $6 billion in 2006, when Goodell replaced Paul Tagliabue, to more than $15 billion now." Wilner: "Such is the roller coaster the head of the most popular and lucrative sport in America must ride."
  
  
• A Washington Post piece on Dr. Bennet Omalu -- portrayed by Will Smith in the 2015 film "Concussion" -- has been sent to me a few times this week. The Post's Will Hobson wrote: "Across the brain science community, there is wide consensus on one thing: Omalu, the man considered by many the public face of CTE research, routinely exaggerates his accomplishments and dramatically overstates the known risks of CTE and contact sports, fueling misconceptions about the disease."
  
  
• Growth in newly permitted sponsorship categories of gambling and wine helped drive total sponsorship spending across the NFL and its 32 clubs to $1.47 billion in 2019, according to numbers crunched by IEG. The NFL’s first official casino partner, Caesars Entertainment, got locked in last year, one of 21 deals across casinos, daily fantasy, online betting and lotteries. Teams and the league signed 18 new wine partnerships. Retail was also something of a dark horse, up 48% this year on the backs of Lowe’s deal to become the official home improvement store.
  
  
• This was a fun little tidbit I read yesterday, courtesy of Mahoning Matters’ Mark Sweetwood: “In early gridiron days, a horn was actually used to signal a penalty, while the traditional whistle stopped play after a down. … The first penalty flags were used in Youngstown on Oct. 17, 1941, at the Youngstown College-Oklahoma City game. An official kept his flag and later used it at an Ohio State University game. Later, the Big Ten officially adopted it.”

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Something on the football beat catch your eye? Tell us about it. Reach out to either me (bfischer@sportsbusinessjournal.com) or Austin Karp (akarp@sportsbusinessjournal.com) and we'll share the best of it. Also contributing to this newsletter is Thomas Leary (tleary@sportsbusinessdaily.com).