We’re fascinated by the annual Super Bowl and the hype and fantastic experiential marketing that surrounds the game.

We love taking a look at the range of activations taking place and the way that brands use the festival to engage with consumers. Last year’s favourites from Minneapolis included Nickelodeon, Ford and Hyundai, and our attention is now turning to the Atlanta event.

There are two main events for fans, the Super Bowl Experience Driven by Hyundai, the NFL’s indoor interactive theme park. The Verizon Super Bowl live fan village is the key outdoor venue this year with a big free-entry space in the Centennial Olympic Park. Here, the fans will be able to enjoy live music on a number of stages and interact with a number of major brands.

Ford are offering a VR drive in a truck, visitors can get into a Ford F-150, Super Duty or Ranger, put on some VR googles and head to Atlanta from a range of locations around the US.

Bridgestone are inviting fans to show off their catching skills on their performance field. Visitors can catch a pass from current NFL players and NFL Legends during multiple sessions throughout the week leading up to the game

Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center is offering guests the chance to meet astronauts, discover NASA sports spinoffs, learn about playing football on Mars vs Moon vs Earth and check out the Mars rover concept vehicle, MRVN®

Wilson will be demonstrating how official NFL game balls are individually produced. Authentic Super Bowl LIII game balls will be manufactured and sold on-site.

If that’s not enough there’s a great range of food and drinks brands waiting to tempt fans in with a cold beer and fast food.

The brands may be the similar to those in Minneapolis but the experiences they offer will be different. A key factor is the climate. Minneapolis is an icy -9 degrees on average in February, so 2018 was perhaps not the time for outdoor activation. Atlanta records a balmy 16 degree average in February, making it possible to run events in a park.

Our Exposure Analytics software allows brands to see how the weather affects visitor data and flows around a stand and would have some interesting results in a mild but changeable Georgia February. An outside event doesn’t preclude brands from capturing and plotting visitor data through our technology. All we need is a 4G signal to produce valuable information about how your audience flowed through your activation. The Bud Light picnic area would make interesting reading if the heavens opened!

The budget brands and agencies devote to the Super Bowl matches the scale of the event itself, one of the biggest in the world. As always, it’s vital to make sure they are spending wisely. We help power experiences through insight, assessing return on marketing investment and helping you to plan future experiential marketing. We’re working with more and more brands in North America as our company grows and hope to be helping evaluate Super Bowl activations in Miami Gardens 2020

Get in touch to find out more about how we do it, or to secure an invite to our exclusive event at Bafta HQ in April.