At the end of Sunday’s Super Bowl, the winning team will be doused in confetti as usual—but there will be a twist to the celebration. Twitter and the National Football League will shower the field with physical tweets.
The league and Twitter, longtime collaborators on gameday, are planning to print people’s messages onto the confetti that drops at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. The confetti stunt is just one part of the NFL’s social media plans for the Big Game, and Twitter will command a large presence at the event.
The NFL has been active on Twitter for the past 11 years, and the Super Bowl is traditionally one of the most-tweeted days of the year. The confetti is a way to take the online conversation surrounding football on Twitter, print it onto the scraps of paper, and drop it on fans and players.
“We’re truly going to be integrated, not only in the Super Bowl, but in the celebration,” says T.J. Adeshola, head of U.S. sports at Twitter.
Now, some people might ask, “who reads the confetti?” But Ian Trombetta, NFL senior VP of influencer marketing, says the celebratory detritus is quite coveted. “People grab that confetti and take it home as memorabilia,” Trombetta says. “And they even sell it online.”
The tweets will come from conversations that have played out on Twitter throughout the season and up until the end of the game. Trombetta says Twitter and the NFL will work with the confetti vendor to print until the last minute, before making them rain down onto the field.
Typically, the tweets stay in people’s timelines on Twitter, where people, brands, media and the NFL teams are sharing messages throughout the game. The NFL says 11 million people tweeted about the league this season. Twitter has 145 million daily active users, according to the company.
The NFL has a robust social media strategy heading into the Super Bowl, according to Trombetta. The league is working with 50 social media stars who will watch the game from a suite at the stadium—and share their experiences, naturally, Trombetta says.
The league is also active on Snapchat, Facebook and, for the first year, TikTok.
“We worked with Twitter to really maximize those opportunities to find new ways to engage with our fans,” Trombetta says. “Confetti tweets, that’s going to be something that’s really special [that will] captivate followers on Twitter by bringing to life this analog moment and this emotional moment.”
