Orlando, FL. – While the Super Bowl is four months behind us, the work has been on-going in evaluating the success of the game as well as the impact it had on the Bay Area as a whole. While attending the SAP Sapphire Conference last week we were able to sit down with Super Bowl 50 Host Committee CEO Keith Bruce to get an update of what his organization did after the event took place and how technology was a strong driver in making it all happen.
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A big question I was very interested in knowing was pretty simple.
Well, what are you up to these days?
“Well I get to sleep a little more these days, maybe 6-7 hours now it was definitely a lot less in the months and weeks leading up to the game.” said Bruce.
In all seriousness though, the Super Bowl Committee was in charge of collecting a lot of data after the game to not only determine how much of a success the week was, but also to provide vital data in the seemingly likely event that the San Francisco Bay Area will bid again for the game in the somewhat near future.
“I would say that half my job right now is capturing the success stories of the game and business metrics that are are important to our sponsors, the NFL and our stakeholders,” Bruce continued. “I need to give the Bay Area the key information from the game to help them determine if they want to try and do this again in 6-7 years. We need to create this cache of evidence that this was successful and that the game was successful and worked all the different entities that were involved in making it happen.”
While the explanation was very straightforward, the process was much more complex and a lot was riding on successful collection of this data in a short period of time. The NFL was expecting lots of key information to take away from the Super Bowl, especially with it being the first Super Bowl for the region in over 30 years and many key stakeholders and sponsors will want to know if their investment was well spent.
“You need to jump on this key data within the first 60 days,” Bruce continued. “It’s very hard to go back and get the data after everything has already happened so you need to move quickly. This is important because I only have staff for 60 days after the game besides myself and my finance director. Basically if everything isn’t done in that time, it will be very hard to continue to get what we need.”
This first involved a Repucom study around fan engagement that determined sentiment around the game and the Super Bowl week as a whole. Three key takeaways from that included 85% of Bay Area residents having a positive experience, 1.9M were engaged with the Super Bowl in some sort of way whether it be attending the game, the Super Bowl City fan experience or any of the surrounding parties in the city. A data point that stood out from the poll for Bruce was the fact that only 8% of residents polled saw the Super Bowl week in a negative light. Which given the numerous backlash in the region to the event, this was a percentage that was viewed as very low. Additionally, it is a tough market to get people enthused about large scale events like this that involve some public funds.
Large amounts of data was used in Super Bowl city throughout the week and another 11TB of data was used in Levi’s Stadium just during the four hour period where fans were around and in the stadium on gameday. From a social standpoint and fan engagement standpoint Bruce referred to the Super Bowl as the “most technologically advanced ever”.
6.8TB of data transferred over free wifi in #SuperBowlCity thanks to @PCM & @ExtremeNetworks https://t.co/OnsZe7O9Rk pic.twitter.com/EvTxzEphiA
— Super Bowl 50 (@superbowl50) March 7, 2016
Collecting the data and utilizing the technology though was not something that is started as soon as the Broncos won the big game. In reality, it was a process that started back in September right when the NFL season was kicking off. The SB 50 Committee and SAP partnered from a data collection standpoint and started to plot what they wanted to capture during the week and figure out the best ways to implement that process.
Bruce was interested in capturing the technology story, the sustainability story as well as the fan engagement story and event operations and display those on the SB 50 Committee website. Those stories are now live but involved a detailed preparation process for months in advance. Each department head worked with Stephanie Martin, the SB 50 Committee Communications lead to make sure all these stories were displayed in the appropriate fashion. The content on the website will also continue to live after it migrates soon to the San Francisco 49ers website and content will continue to be curated moving forward. The 49ers and the Host Committee each have websites created by Channel 1 Media, so this process is about as seamless as it can get.
The decision to partner with SAP was in part because it was the “deepest dive” into the data according to Bruce and gave them everything they need to track. The software had deep analytical capabilities and is displayed in a very simple way to consume on a portal for fans, sponsors and other stakeholders with the NFL and the Super Bowl.
“Ultimately though, you can have the best technology out there but your results are only as good as the data you feed into the machine,” Bruce said. “It was my job to figure out what that data was and how that could be maximized with technologically capabilities of SAP’s back-end work.”
This also included a new app specifically for volunteers with Phizzle that streamlined the process and the challenges of handling the huge Super Bowl related crowds that often consist of visitors that are unfamiliar with the area. This included easy to use functionality for volunteers and helped them utilize the app’s information to better communicate to each other as well as not have to memorize all the information passed along to them during the process. It also enabled the Committee to mass communicate to the work force on the fly and make implementations that weren’t available before. In short, Bruce said it helped lower the attrition rates for the volunteers and helped the workforce feel empowered and eliminated problems that were commonly associated with volunteering large scale events.
As we head towards the summer now, the next NFL season will be right around the corner and the SB 51 Committee in Houston will start working in earnest to duplicate a similar experience for their game in February 2017. While each committee is tasked with similar duties, the efforts are often different depending on the region where the game is being played. Bruce mentioned that Houston’s efforts will likely vary from the Bay Area’s as the region’s characteristics aren’t the same.
“Overall I knew that with the Super Bowl being located in the heart of Silicon Valley, I knew the technology for everything we were doing had to be top notch,” Bruce said. “I knew how technologically advanced the actual game would be and I knew that our efforts had to match that from a technology standpoint or hopefully exceed it.”
Once all the data was collected, copies of the findings were left with the 49ers and San Francisco Travel. This data will be integral in the future when operations will be evaluated for future large scale events and could one day help bring the Super Bowl back to the Bay Area.