- The city that plays host to the Super Bowl also hosts many parties ahead of the big game.
- Insider spoke with several people behind the biggest parties of Super Bowl week.
Super Bowl parties come in all shapes and sizes.
Fans watching from home might gather with a few friends and family, order pizza and wings, and enjoy the game, the commercials, the halftime show, and all the pomp and circumstance that comes with Super Bowl Sunday. You might also go to a bar or other centralized locale to get a bit rowdier with fellow die-hard football fans.
But with so much star power in town for the Super Bowl, parties in the host city are a whole different animal, with events, shindigs, and jamborees of all types putting on a show and, hopefully, a great night.
Insider spent the weeks leading up to Super Bowl LVII speaking with the people behind some of the biggest parties Super Bowl week has to offer to get a glimpse behind the scenes and see what goes into throwing a Super Bowl-sized extravaganza.
Before any Super Bowl party can be planned, one problem must first be solved: location, location, location
While the teams contesting any given Super Bowl aren't known until two weeks before the big game, the host city is known well in advance.
For those behind the Super Bowl parties, scouting for locations begins far in advance.
David Spencer and Michael Heller, Co-CEOs of marketing agency Talent Resources Sports (TRS), have been throwing events during Super Bowl week for 15 years.
In Arizona ahead of Super Bowl LVII, they'll be hosting Rolling Stone LIVE and several other events at The Clayton House, a venue in Scottsdale. The process has been in the works for close to a year.
"When we're engineering these events, it really is built around the real estate," Spencer said. "What we want to do is provide a platform that people don't normally get to experience. It's really about finding these unique, out-of-the-box venues and then adding our magic touch."
For TRS, the search for a location begins before a client is locked in for the Super Bowl. Once the place is booked, the company can reach partners they've worked with and give an idea of what they can offer during the week of the game.
Medium Rare is behind four massive events this Super Bowl week, including Gronk Beach, Shaq's Fun House, and Sports Illustrated The Party, all hosted at Talking Stick Resort. Medium Rare co-founders Joe Silberzweig and Adam Richman booked the space nearly nine months before the Super Bowl to ensure they secured their spot.
Booking earlier in the year allows companies to capture great venues before they are nabbed by other party planners. Still, other parties aren't the only competition for space during Super Bowl week.
"A lot of the research starts with: what is and is not within the NFL block that we can go and really get our hands on?" Tracy Ogrean, VP of Hospitality at Excel Sports Management, who is leading the planning process for her own agency's party told Insider.
Marriage between venue and messaging is also important. Last year, Michelob Ultra tied in their Big Lebowski-inspired ad with a Super Bowl party at a bowling alley.
For this year's Michelob Ultra party, the brand is heading to Top Golf, a tie-in with their Caddyshack-inspired ad spot for the Super Bowl. The event will also be a premiere for Netflix's new golf documentary series "Full Swing."
"We are looking to stand out and to create something really unique and special by drawing inspiration from our Super Bowl spot," said Ricardo Marques, VP of Marketing at Michelob Ultra.
Given these events' size and scope, there are many moving parts
Once a location has been secured, the rest of the planning can begin.
Many jobs that need to be filled will come as no surprise — bartenders are needed to sling cocktails and drinks, caterers are needed to feed the crowd, and security to ensure that nobody's good time is ruined by someone else's.
But plenty of prep work goes into making these events truly one of a kind. Medium Rare will also be hosting Guy Fieri's Flavortown Tailgate, which they expect to host 10,000 fans ahead of Sunday's game just outside the stadium.
The event will feature a spicy wing challenge between former NFL stars Chad Ochocinco and LeSean McCoy and is sponsored by TUMS.
"To land that TUMS deal, we probably did 50 zooms and 20 proposals to ultimately lock that in," Silberzweig told Insider.
Take the 50 zooms and 20 proposals that it took to plan for their TUMS activation, multiply that by the hundreds of brands that Medium Rare will be working with over the course of their four events, and you can get a pretty good idea of the number of emails and spreadsheets the pros behind these parties are juggling at any one time.
Even once all the deals are locked in, smaller jobs need to be covered on the day of the event.
With Michelob Ultra's event serving as both a Netflix premiere and golf party, there is a big screen and projector to be attended to and golf clubs to be managed. Marques says the install for the party will likely begin four days beforehand.
For TRS' takeover of The Clayton House, the load-in will begin the Monday before the Super Bowl, with smaller events leading up to Rolling Stone LIVE at the end of the week.
Spencer and Heller estimate that between 400 and 500 people will be working the party that night, but it's difficult to even guess an exact number given all the moving parts.
But the jobs involved can get even more granular.
"There's a person that's putting tape down over wires to make sure no one trips," Heller said. "You have to think of tape and of having the right tape. There's the carpet cutter because we have the red carpet, and it's bespoke. There's the person that comes in to take pictures before the photographers come to make sure that [they are] getting all of the branding in with the right lighting."
For other parties, the choice of venue can help ease a bit of the stress of hosting.
For Excel's party, The W Scottsdale provides a one-stop shop for some of the more run-of-the-mill concerns. The venue is helping not only with location, but food and beverage, photography, videographer, and more on the day of the event.
"Knowing that there's so much going on this year, efficiency was a huge goal in selecting that venue partner," Ogrean said. "It freed up my team's time to also not only focus on the important Excel event but also focus on the really important client work that is also taking place in and around Super Bowl and Waste Management Open."
Doors are another big factor.
"The way that the doors are set up, that's extremely important because you have three different types of people coming in," Heller explained.
Between celebrities walking the red carpet, sponsors slipping into the event, and the people working the event behind the scenes, everyone needs a clean way to the venue.
Like any other party, problems arise, big and small, but veterans have learned
"You're going to laugh at this one, but I think flooring is hugely important," Ogrean said when asked for an aspect of the job that a layperson might overlook.
It's a lesson she learned the hard way during a Super Bowl party in Miami.
"We rented a house, and they had this beautiful white, alabaster floor outside by the pool," Ogrean said. "It rained, and it was so slippery."
With that lesson, Ogrean decided never again.
"I hold onto that wherever we are. At the pool deck here, they're covering the pool. And I will tell you I am so fearful of what that material is, of how we're cleaning it, how are we keeping it dry."
At a TRS event years ago, it was an issue with the ice.
The ice came as was expected, but the receptacles that were meant to hold the ice were nowhere to be found.
"We had to send an army all over the place," Heller said. "This was before Uber." Frantic trips to Walmart and Target didn't solve the problem entirely.
"I think we got down to like, 'Hey, we can go to a fish shop and get fish bowls to put ice in?'"
They made it work, and it came down to another lesson learned.
"Now we know," Heller said. "We order that three months in advance."
Another time it was the lighting. At one early TRS event, the red carpet's lighting had a glaze, leaving the following photos in poor shape.
"There was no touching it up," Heller said. "Thank God we got great ambiance pictures. We had to tell the client, look, forget about the red carpet."
Everything worked out, and another lesson was learned — now there's a pre-shoot on the red carpet before the event to ensure the shots will turn out.
For Medium Rare, lessons learned from their first events they hosted helped shape their company moving forward.
"The first Shaq's Funhouse [co-founder Adam Richman] and I built the entire thing overnight, by hand, in eight hours," Silberzweig said.
The duo pulled an all-nighter that included an impressive Kinko's bill and Craigslist posts looking for help to hang signage. With Shaq's Fun House now in its eighth iteration, the operation has gotten bigger but much smoother, with Silberzweig and Richman able to refrain from getting their hands as dirty as they did back in the day.
Asked if any part of him missed the good ol' days of hanging up signs by himself, Silberzweig was quick to answer.
"Nope. Not at all," he said with a laugh. "I'm glad we have the memories, but too stressful. And to be honest, I can't use a hammer and a nail."
Handling the celebrities and talent at the parties is also quite an endeavor. Sometimes a power player will show up to a party with a bigger entourage than expected. Sometimes there are ticket snafus, someone sits at the wrong table.
But with every passing year, the planners behind these parties get more comfortable handling whatever problem arises.
Different parties serve different purposes, but at the core of it, everyone is just trying to throw a good time
Every Super Bowl party is different. While each event involves some degree of celebration and brand activation, with the volume knobs of each turned up to different levels depending on the crowd being served.
TRS is delivering a great party for its clients. Mich Ultra and Excel are throwing a great party for themselves, and those they partner with. Medium Rare is working to build the brands of Shaq and Gronk and others that will surely follow to become their own self-sustaining party animals.
With each event, partnerships need to be made, deals need to be brokered, and brands need to be activated. But at the core of all that, is just throwing a good time.
If you do that, the rest will follow.