Brand Experience and Activation > Excellence in Brand Experience

SPHERE X SUPER BOWL LVIII

SPHERE ENTERTAINMENT , New York / NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE (NFL) / 2024

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Overview

Credits

Overview

Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

With this year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas, Sphere collaborated with the NFL and CBS Sports to activate the game on the largest, most innovative canvas in the world, becoming the ‘Pulse of Super Bowl LVIII’. Sphere offered a brand experience on a magnitude never seen before, beaming pre-game, gameday, and post-game content, from countdowns and artist takeovers to game highlights, live scoring updates, and bespoke activations, transforming into ‘The World’s Screen’ with millions joining the spectacle. Sphere enabled one of the biggest sporting events to shine even brighter, captivating fans on-ground and around the world through social and broadcast.

Please provide any cultural context that would help the Jury understand any cultural, national or regional nuances applicable to this work.

For the first ever Super Bowl in Las Vegas, 500,000 visitors descended into town, making it the biggest stage in American sports, yet only about 65,000 would experience the game at Allegiant Stadium. The NFL and CBS Sports challenged Sphere to elevate the fan experience for the remaining 435,000 outside the stadium and the hundreds of millions of football fans around the world.

Sphere Entertainment brought a new level of wonder to the Super Bowl through the Exosphere, a massive, first-of-its-kind art gallery and digital brand canvas. Through immersive and spectacular content, we programmed the Exosphere to be the “Pulse of the Game”, enabling those outside the stadium to feel every beat of the game – every pass, kick, fumble, and touchdown. In turn, across social, Sphere enabled the world to see, feel and experience the Super Bowl like never before.

In 2024, the Exosphere became a centerpiece of Super Bowl LVIII.

Background

There’s no bigger moment in sports than the Super Bowl. With all eyes on Las Vegas, hosting this year’s game for the first time in history, Sphere’s challenge was to provide a canvas and programming that would amplify the event and take it to a whole new level of viewership and engagement.

In partnership with the NFL and CBS Sports, Sphere programmed the Exosphere with stunning content including live game highlights, sports themed artist takeovers, the world’s biggest and fuzziest fan, and brand moments that activated the world like never before. With Sphere at the center of the Super Bowl buzz, it elevated Super Bowl LVIII to a whole new level, shattering viewership records in the process.

Describe the creative idea

To elevate Super Bowl LVIII, Sphere Entertainment transformed the Exosphere into the world’s most dynamic canvas, beaming countdowns, game highlights, live score updates, and enlisting our original Sphere characters to become a central part of the Super Bowl experience. With stunning programming and live moments, the Exosphere cemented itself as a major centerpiece for one of the biggest moments in sports. Sphere amplified Super Bowl LVIII by capturing ‘The Pulse of the Game’ and providing a new canvas for sports and brands to activate fans globally, helping them experience the game in a whole new way.

Describe the strategy

To elevate this year’s Super Bowl to new heights, our task was twofold – excite the football fans travelling into Vegas, while also amplifying the game to the millions of spectators worldwide.

Our approach was to broadcast the Super Bowl LVIII experience beyond the stadium, turning Sphere into “The World’s Screen” to amplify the game experience. Sphere became the place where larger than life ideas played out, from football themed artist takeovers to activations that heightened the game, all on a 35-storey, volumetric, spherical screen.

We programmed the Exosphere to capture the “Pulse of the Game” and make America’s grandest sports stage even grander, giving fans on-ground a thrilling experience, while inviting fans around the world to join the spectacle via social. The Sphere Super Bowl Experience helped Super Bowl LVIII become one of the most exciting and watched of all time.

Describe the execution

Planning for the event started with the NFL eight months prior, as the amount of creative development, R&D, and planning was a massive undertaking. We developed and produced over 73 original pieces of content to take over the Exosphere during the Super Bowl; all needing to be built for the Exosphere’s one-of-a-kind specs. Pieces had to be perfectly timed with key-beats of the event including the national anthem, the Thunderbirds F-16 flyover, and leveraging Exosphere as the world’s biggest instant replay screen showing key highlights from the game. The Exosphere captured the “Pulse of the Game”, enabling fans to see, feel and experience the Super Bowl like never before.

List the results

With the Super Bowl’s viewer ratings shattering previous US records we saw impressive metrics as our executions took over social leading up to and during the event:

BROADCAST STATS

Over 123,400,000 viewers tuned into the Super Bowl where they saw Sphere incorporated into the broadcast (over 40% of the American population).

SOCIAL STATS

- 34,148,306 Impressions (Over 10% of the American population)

- 30,340,148 Views

- 2,084,602 Engagements

- 11.8B+ Reach

- The Biggest TV Audience Since the Moon Landing

- Over 90 seconds of free Super Bowl broadcast coverage of Sphere

- Metrics showed that Sphere was instrumental in bringing those who would never watch the Super Bowl into the game.

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