Fortnite Stadium – Verizon & NFL

In February 2021 the National Football League (NFL) restricted the live stadium attendance for its flagship Super Bowl game, so Verizon sought to keep fans connected to their passion through a Super Bowl Stadium 5G experience mash-up within Fortnite which, according to the telco itself, delivered Verizon’s largest sports activation in its history.

Territory: USA

Agency: R/GA New York

Objectives

Super Bowl LV was held on 7 February 2021 and the NFL’s showpiece championship game – which saw the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs 31-9 – was played in front of just 24,835 fans due to pandemic-enforced live attendance crowd restrictions.

Played in Tampa’s own Raymond James Stadium, the ground’s 65,890 capacity was drastically reduced due to Covid-19 restrictions and safety protocols, so NFL partner Verizon tasked agency R/GA New York to show how Verizon 5G could bring the ultimate Super Bowl experience to millions of fans in a year where they were ‘unable to enjoy all the in-person magic of the Big Game’.

The pandemic brought many limitations to the league, the game and to its fans, so the agency sought to turn the pandemic restrictions into an opportunity to demonstrate the unifying power of Verizon 5G.

R/GA’s own objective was to reimagine the live event virtually through the power of 5G in a way that would actually create a more connected Super Bowl experience than ever before.

Activation

A joint Verizon and R/GA team linked up with global gaming behemoth Fortnite and a group of Fortnite map builders (led by Team Beyond) to create the ‘Verizon 5G Stadium’ and create a set of four football-inspired games which could be played in the replica Raymond James stadium.

The initiative, the largest ever brand activation in Fortnite, took 42 days to complete with 2,754 hours spent building an experience which consisted of more than 100,000 digital pieces built using the ultra-low lag and latency of Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband.

Once the virtual stadium and games were ready, in the week leading up to Super Bowl LV, the telco partnered with a group of entertainment celebrities, NFL stars and gaming influencers to host two primetime livestreams on Twitch which were also simulcast across all of Verizon’s own social channels.

The gamers and celebrities went head-to-head with NFL players enabling gamer fans to interact with their favourite NFL stars and the brand also re-created live fan interactions in-game through ‘avatar-to-avatar’ meet and greets between fans and NFL players.

A multi-media campaign invited viewers to ‘come visit the virtual in-game stadium’ during the week before the Big Game to ‘play, party, and win’ at the Fortnite Creative Hub.

Outcome

With only 22,000 spectators able to be in the stadium in person due to pandemic restrictions, a whopping 40m fans visited the Verizon 5G stadium while more than 5m tuned in to the livestreams on Twitch and 1.5m played stadium games themselves.

This resulted in Verizon’s activation generating 3.6bn total impressions and being the most discussed telco during Super Bowl week on social media and saw the brand trend number one on Twitter in terms of ‘social share of Super Bowl conversation’.