Nearly 112 million people tuned in to watch Super Bowl 50 this year, an average viewership that surpassed all of the major award shows combined. While the game is the N.F.L.’s most visible event, the league produces some 80 events a year. It is as effective as any company at using events to build its brand, and innovation is an “ingrained mentality at the organization,” says Peter O’Reilly, senior vice president of events for the N.F.L.
“There’s this fairly relentless desire to build upon what we’re doing,” he says, “and reinvent and reimagine each year.”
With that mandate, the N.F.L. had an ideal home for this year’s game in Northern California, the capital of innovation. The league is an institution built on celebrating its history, but O’Reilly says the championship game’s golden anniversary also anticipated the next 50 years. One major change was turning media day into a prime-time event that kicked off Super Bowl week and inviting fans to purchase tickets to see the spectacle. It launched the N.F.L. Women’s Summit in which female leaders such as tennis star Serena Williams and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked about the impact of sports on their careers. Another new effort, the First and Future event with Stanford Business School, asked the start-up community for ideas on topics such as the stadium of the future. At the game itself, a class photo of past Super Bowl M.V.P.s created a signature moment even before the kickoff.
Another signature event is the annual player draft. Once a business meeting, the springtime event became a massive fan festival when it was forced to move from its home in New York because of a conflict with longtime host venue Radio City Music Hall. Moving to Chicago for 2015 created the opportunity to reinvent the event with an entire “Draft Town” for fans in the city’s Grant Park that drew some 200,000 people. More partners signed on for the 2016 version, which grew from “15 football fields in size”—O’Reilly’s on-theme unit of measurement—to 20 football fields in size. And other cities are now vying to host the event.
Even as the N.F.L. deals with serious issues such as the impact of concussions on players, it’s recognized as the most powerful and profitable of the major sports leagues. The N.F.L. made a strategic shift by shedding its nonprofit status in 2015. It counted total revenues of $12.4 billion in 2015, and commissioner Roger Goodell has set a goal of hitting $25 billion by 2027.
“We’ll continue to push and do things bigger and bolder at the Super Bowl and the draft and kickoff,” O’Reilly says. “But it’s taking those moments that are small today and thinking, How do we make them bigger 10 years from now? That’s the fun part.”
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