Our latest white paper, Who’s in the Stands? An In-Depth Look at Arena and Stadium Visits uses location analytics tools to uncover the demographic and psychographic traits of sporting event attendees – including Super Bowl fans. With the big game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles in the books, we reexamined some of our favorite analyses from the report using visit metrics from the latest Super Bowl. For the full report, click here.
Post-Game Dining: Putting the Bowl in Super Bowl
For Super Bowl tourists in the host city, food is a big part of the game experience. And for the host city, Super Bowl foot traffic provides an economic boost to the local dining sector and the city as a whole.
Western U.S. cities in particular have a lot to gain from hosting the Super Bowl. For the last several years, the Super Bowl has kicked off at 6:30pm ET which means that Super Bowls hosted in western U.S. time zones adjust to start earlier and end earlier locally. As a result, a host city in the Pacific or Mountain time zone – as was the case with the two most recent Super Bowls – can capitalize on post-game restaurant foot traffic since there’s still time to grab dinner or a celebratory bite outside the stadium after the game.
Of attendees to 2023’s Super Bowl in Glendale, AZ, 7.2% visited a restaurant after the game while 3.9% and 5.2% of visitors did so after the 2019 and 2020 contests in Atlanta, GA and Miami Gardens, FL, respectively. And Glendale, AZ and nearby Phoenix are not nearly as well known for their food scenes as Miami or Atlanta, which makes the dining increase after 2023’s Super Bowl even more impressive. Mountain Time is one hour ahead of Pacific Time, so it makes sense that Super Bowl post-game dining visits in 2023 were down slightly from 2022’s Super Bowl in Los Angeles (14.0%), but still ahead of years when the game was held on the East Coast.
Family Fun Makes a Super Bowl Run
Since 2019, the True Trade Areas of the Super Bowl stadiums include greater shares of larger families. This year’s Super Bowl LVII had an in-person audience that reflected a trade area in which 20.8% of residents came from families of five or more, up from 12.6% at the Super Bowl four years prior. Conversely, Super Bowl attendees in 2023 reflected a trade area in which 36.7% of residents were part of two-person households, a decrease from 46.8% in 2019.
The increase in attendees from areas with larger families could reflect the NFL’s initiatives to make football a more family-friendly sport, including rule and equipment changes aimed at increasing player safety and supporting youth football clubs. The trend towards an increase in attendees from larger families may also inform decisions about products to promote as well as amenities that will contribute to a family-friendly experience on game day.
Brands invest heavily in ads that air during the Super Bowl. But with the right insights, stadium advertising platforms have tremendous potential to reach target audiences in-person at the big game. While a large audience is part of the equation, in order to achieve maximum impact, an in-depth understanding of visitors is critical.
For more insights into sports events attendees, read the full report here.
