Super Bowl Kicks Off Super Perks
When Des Fuller flew into Southern California this weekend, he joined a select club of Super Bowl fans assembled for a jampacked time of golf outings, sumptuous dinners, big-name concerts and chic cocktail parties.
Ordinary fans will have to scramble faster than John Elway to catch a pregame glimpse of National Football League luminaries. But Fuller and others who are guests of some of the country’s biggest corporations will schmooze with NFL stars at ticket-only affairs and sit out the traffic jams in a lavish hospitality village in the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot.
Sure, a football game will take place here today, but for Corporate America the on-the-field action is overshadowed by the chance for glad-handing between business chieftains and their best customers and other elite guests.
Corporations such as Miller Brewing Co. and Coca-Cola see the Super Bowl as a gigantic annual marketing fest. Some spend freely to pamper top salespeople like Fuller--and send a message to laggards watching the game at home. Salespeople in turn will use the rarefied atmosphere of the Super Bowl to make and hone contacts that could pay dividends back home.
In fact, there may not be a better place in America than San Diego to do business this weekend--one reason more than 80,000 out-of-towners were expected to descend on the city for an event at which only 70,000 spectators will be seated.
On the schedule for preferred guests were two dozen events put on by the NFL and hundreds of private affairs where the chosen few could mingle. Guests of powerful National Football League corporate sponsors like Sprint and Ford Motor Co. got to rub shoulders with members of the Green Bay Packers and Denver Broncos and will hear pregame strategy talks this morning from media personalities like ABC’s Dan Dierdorf.
“It’s mind-boggling,” said Fuller, 50, who earned his Super Bowl trip by being the top salesman for Volvo Trucks North America. “It’s one of those things you always wanted to do but could never afford.”
Fuller’s weekend will include a fair share of work, and he’s looking forward to it. “What goes on around this football game is as important or more important than the game itself,” said the Dallas resident. “I’m a salesman, and meeting customers is my business.”
One Big Event, Many Smaller Ones
Think scoring a Super Bowl ticket is difficult? Try getting your hands on the closely guarded credentials and passes needed to enter the 600,000-square-foot corporate hospitality village erected outside the stadium in San Diego’s Mission Valley. Inside, they will dine on gourmet fare such as steamed crab and roast duck while bands play and former Super Bowl stars circulate.
Or try gaining entry to the exclusive NFL Tailgate party at the stadium, where the NFL will fete top executives from corporations that paid about $125 million this past season to serve as NFL corporate sponsors.
“It means something to my circle of friends or your circle of friends to be standing in a private tent at the stadium,” said Jim Jones, the Marriott executive orchestrating entertainment and meals for nearly 10,000 corporate guests. “And once you’ve been there and done that, you want to go back--not to the game, but to the event.”
Rising costs are forcing some corporations to trim delegations or drop out altogether. But, for now, the NFL experience remains the motivational vehicle of choice for many companies, most notably auto manufacturers like Ford, which will bring about 265 of its most successful dealers to the game.
It “remains the place to be seen, the place to be heard in corporate America,” Jones said. “As long as you newspaper guys keep writing about it every day and every TV news camera in America is at the game, people are going to want to be there.”
Corporate interest in the Super Bowl has grown during the decade since the game last touched down in San Diego. At Super Bowl XXII in 1988, when Washington’s Redskins easily dismantled the Denver Broncos, the face value of a ticket was $100, the NFL sold $14 million in bowl-branded memorabilia, and advertisers grumbled about paying $675,000 for a 30-second commercial.
For Super Bowl XXXII, the face value of the cheapest ticket is $275, advertisers will pay $1.3 million for a 30-second spot, and fans will buy more than $130 million in Super Bowl merchandise.
Air traffic controllers are gearing up to handle as many as 1,100 additional flights into San Diego during the long weekend, not to mention the four blimps, 40 banner-towing aircraft and swarm of news choppers that will be overhead during the game.
Soaring Costs, Opportunities
Critics grumble that corporate interests long ago displaced fans at the game, a gripe that will gain in currency after the NFL’s new $17.6-billion broadcast rights package. But corporate identity experts argue that there is little in this country more prestigious for corporate marketing programs than to be allied with the Super Bowl.
“If we were to brand America, the brand would be the Super Bowl,” said Jim Johnson, president of Anspach Grossman Enterprise, a New York-based consulting firm. “This game is all about freedom, excitement and fulfilling your dreams. It’s the challenge of the best going up against the best.
“And for corporations that can tap into that pulse, it presents some very intriguing marketing possibilities.”
San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc., which is trying to gain name parity with better-known cell phone competitors like Ericsson and Motorola, is one company that is using the game to market itself in a big way.
Although it isn’t an NFL corporate sponsor, Qualcomm will broadcast its first-ever national TV commercial Sunday. It has an ad in the Super Bowl program and its name is stamped on every Super Bowl ticket.
Qualcomm’s biggest boost should occur during the game. For the first time, the game is being played in a stadium carrying a corporate name--so Qualcomm’s name will be broadcast each time NBC cameras pan the scoreboard and announcers refer to the venue.
“Three mentions alone during the telecast will be worth about $1.3 million, which is the cost of a 30-second commercial,” said Eric Wright, a vice president at Joyce Julius Associates, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based sports marketing firm.
Fans need not walk into the stadium to be hit by a corporate logo.
When the NFL Players Assn.’s official golf tournament teed off last Wednesday at Coto de Caza Golf & Racquet Club in Orange County, the event boasted one prime sponsor, Pace Salsa, and 30 secondary sponsors, ranging from British Airways to Vlasic pickles.
Sprint, which brought an army of 300 workers to town to provide the NFL with communications, has blanketed San Diego with its logo. The company will distribute 70,000 seat cushions at the game, has hung 900 street banners and stamped its image on 10,000 key cards at upscale hotels. And it is co-hosting with Coca-Cola the NFL Experience, a football fantasy land where more than 100,000 paying customers will don official NFL uniforms, tour a “real” locker room, toss footballs and pick up free autographs from NFL heroes.
Sprint hopes to flash its name more than a million times during the weekend, said Pam Kramer, group manager of Sprint’s corporate sponsorship marketing programs: “You cannot get that kind of visibility at any other event in this country.”
Places to Go, People to See
Corporate sponsors will abound at dozens of official--and countless unofficial--concerts, golf outings, charity luncheons, cocktail parties and dinner parties. Several of the NFL’s biggest stars turned out for a dinner party hosted by Miller Brewing Co. for select distributors and retailers.
The dramatic surge in Super Bowl-related events dates to the last San Diego Super Bowl, NFL officials say, when 48,000 fans lined up Friday and Saturday before the game to tour the empty stadium--just to say they were there.
“That was an unbelievable phenomenon,” said Jim Steeg, the NFL’s vice president of special events.
This time, the most sought-after events are those that, like the Super Bowl itself, drip with exclusivity. Big corporations are hiring pop stars--including Kool & the Gang and Michael McDonald--to serenade their guests and NFL stars from past Super Bowls to rub shoulders with them.
NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue hosted 2,000 of his closest friends Friday night at San Diego’s bay-front convention center--the hottest ticket of the weekend. And NFL Properties, the league’s licensing arm, threw a party for 5,000 business associates at Sea World on Friday night.
Guest lists will be far more select at parties thrown by Fortune 100 companies. Ford is using a hangar at a local military base for one of its main functions and plans to take its dealers and their guests on a tour of an aircraft carrier.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. carried its guests into town on meticulously restored railroad cars that will serve as a unique hospitality suite during the weekend.
Royal Caribbean Cruises is using its Viking Serenade ship to house seven lucky travel agents who won all-expense-paid trips to the Super Bowl.
Volvo is hosting an intimate party for its most important customers--the 1% of corporate buyers who account for 40% of truck sales--where Fuller will work the crowd.
Most of Southern California’s signature golf courses were booked for the weekend, and some corporations have bused invitees to South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa for a morning shopping trip, an afternoon at a spa and dinner at the private Center Club.
Name of the Game Is Business
On game day, corporations will wine and dine customers at the corporate “hospitality village” surrounding Qualcomm Stadium, where crews have built elaborate party sets ranging from sports bars and “south of the border” themes to Southern California beach scenes. Corporations will pay a minimum of $285 per person for their guests to eat artichoke salads and grilled swordfish and drink freely at the corporate village.
There’s nothing mysterious about what corporations expect from the costly weekend.
They want to win more business from top customers who undoubtedly will go home with a Super Bowl tale to tell and enough complimentary sports paraphernalia to carry them through to next year’s game.
And corporate America has a dual reason for wining and dining top salespeople: Thanking them for building corporate profits and building fires under competitors who missed the Super Bowl cut.
“It’s all about going back to the water cooler on Monday morning and saying, ‘Guess where I was?’ ” Jones said.
It’s also about the guys and gals at the water cooler who watched the game on TV slinking back to their offices mumbling, “Next year I’m going to be the one at the game.”
Ford, a perennial NFL sponsor, considers its sizable, year-round sponsorship of NFL football to be a solid investment. It reports solid interest from dealers who each year enter contests that offer winners a Super Bowl weekend.
“This is the premiere sporting event in the country, and it symbolizes competition,” said John Swigard, special promotions coordinator for Ford Motor Co.
Johnson, the corporate identity consultant, says the millions that companies will spend on Super Bowl schmoozing can be worth their weight in gold.
“You have the perfect setting to target your 200 best dealers, your most important customers,” Johnson said. “You’re focusing everything on these people by cutting through all the clutter.”
While 144 million TV viewers sip a cold one and break off chips in the dip, the corporate elite will be shaking hands with NFL greats, playing golf on Southern California’s finest courses and lugging home suitcases full of expensive trinkets.
“In the end,” Johnson said, “you’re going to have those people totally energized, totally on your side.”
