Brief:
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The National Football League is building a single standalone mobile app for the Super Bowl, which will be played on Feb. 4 between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots, the reigning champions. The app will handle fan activities in the week leading up to the event, along with game-day functions for U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, per Mobile Sports Report. "Fan Mobile Pass" will serve as the Super Bowl app.
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Aaron Amendolia, vice president of IT services for the NFL’s office of the CIO, said creating a single app was a way to avoid confusion among separate apps for Super Bowl activities. Last year, the NFL required fans to download a separate NFL Mobile app to see highlights and other game-related content.
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Fans can sign up for the app on the Super Bowl app website. The app will feature gamification, social media engagement, wayfinding maps and the ability to take a photo of the Super Bowl trophy.
Insight:
The NFL is among the sports leagues that are experimenting with new ways to engage with fans on mobile platforms, not only with the live-streaming of content, but also with enhancing the experience of attending a live game at a stadium. The NFL’s Super Bowl app promises to help people navigate their way around the stadium and participate in sponsored activities, such as the NFL Super Bowl Live fan site on Nicollet Mall. Unlike the Minnesota Vikings stadium app, the Super Bowl app won’t have “blue dot” wayfinding that shows people step-by-step navigation through the stadium.
The Super Bowl app won’t have mobile food ordering capabilities, although the Minnesota Vikings experimented with the feature at home games last season. That kind of capability would require greater mobile integration between the league’s technology and the stadium’s. The app will allow fans to order merchandise to pick up at locations in Minneapolis during the week before the game.
Unfortunately for the Vikings, they won’t be playing in their home stadium for the Super Bowl, which would have been a first for the NFL. That would have raised an interesting question of whether the Vikings app would be available alongside the standalone Super Bowl app.
