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Inside the Super Bowl bubble: The Drum’s Jen Faull on a distinct lack of advertising buzz at the MetLife stadium

By Jennifer Faull

February 4, 2014 | 6 min read

Super Bowl in New York. All the ingredients for one massive event. And this year I wasn’t watching it from a couch 5,000 miles away. I was in the heart of the action which, much like the advertising battle, kicked off weeks before the big game.To celebrate the Super Bowl’s arrival in Manhattan, a 13-block stretch from 34th to 47th streets was closed off to traffic. You can imagine the feat of city planning a move like that entailed. Dubbed ‘Super Bowl Boulevard’, it housed the Fox News, ESPN and CNN studios as well as an array of over-the-top billboards from Super Bowl advertisers.And it didn’t stop there.Downtown, at New York pier, a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship was rebranded to become the ‘Bud Light Hotel’ and over in Bryant Park Pepsico erected a 10,000-square-foot dome to host a series of Super Bowl themed events. The streets were buzzing and nothing was done half-heartedly. But would you expect anything else when in one of America’s most iconic cities for the biggest sporting event of the year?

The view from the MetLife stadium. But where are the brands?

You might find it surprising then that this wasn’t carried over with the same gusto in the MetLife Stadium, the New Jersey venue of the big game and where I found myself on Sunday evening.Walking through the gates to the concourse, it wouldn’t have taken long to count the number of Pepsi logos and Bud Light stalls around the perimeter.Both are the official drinks partners of the Super Bowl, so where were the 20ft soda cans and Bud bottles the size of houses that I’d left in Times Square?Rather than the advertising-fest that the Super Bowl is on screen, inside the stadium it was all very… restrained. Not a word that immediately springs to mind when describing the Super Bowl.As I found my seat, and the Seahawks and Broncos took to the field to get ready, I knew the advertising battle would be kicking off. I was right. #adbowl was already trending on Twitter.But, looking around, Snickers was the only brand I was aware of. It was the official sponsor of the Warm Up session but, aside from a small logo in the corner of a giant screen, it was difficult to even ascertain that.The game got underway and before long we were at the first time-out. For TV viewers, I knew this meant a commercial. But for everyone in the stadium, it was a Pepsi-sponsored replay of the last 30-seconds. It was only at the end of the first quarter that the first TV ad, for Budweiser, quietly came and went. Pepsi aired its spot at the end of the second quarter ahead of its half-time show.Feeling out of the advertising loop, I checked Twitter to find that Chrysler was trending. Why? I had no idea. Not a single Chrysler ad had played in the stadium. But I quickly realised the now notable Bob Dylan commercial had just aired and it was all people could talk about, albeit for the wrong reasons.I was most definitely in a MetLife bubble. Completely unaware of the brands that had paid $4m a pop to be part of the Super Bowl experience.In fact, for me the only brand to make their presence felt in the stadium was Doritos. It dressed a handful of people in the crowd in Denver orange jackets and together they formed its triangular crisp shape, which on TV, and in the stadium, looked great.I admit that I went to the Super Bowl with eyes peeled for big marketing gestures. The adverts have become such a central part of the Super Bowl experience, they are talked about in the run up to the game. They are polled during it. And the next day people will share their favourites. Perhaps that’s why I found it so surprising, disappointing even, that the advertising element is more or less lost at the stadium. But I suspect I might have been the only one of the 82,000 fans there that night to feel that way about an ad-free Super Bowl. Jen Faull is a reporter for The Drum

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