After making a splash at the Super Bowl last year with a national ad starring Beyoncé, Verizon’s 2025 Big Game marketing took a decidedly local turn. The brand Verizon skipped buying an in-game ad and hosted Super Bowl watch parties at stadiums and venues in all 30 NFL markets.

“We felt so strongly about the FanFest idea and concept that we felt it would break through,” said Nick Kelly, VP of partnerships at Verizon, speaking on the latest episode of the Marketer’s Brief podcast. “We didn’t need to also have a TV commercial out there promoting it. We’re fully bought into the idea of showing up locally.”

Regionalized marketing has allowed the brand to make culturally relevant appeals to customers, Kelly said. Events such as FanFest show consumers the kind of perks they get for being Verizon customers and allow the brand to differentiate itself from competitors also investing in experiential perks.

Read more: Verizon uses exclusive perks to boost customer loyalty

Verizon has invested in local marketing over the past year, which enabled it to pull off a concept like FanFest for the first time. It coordinated with six market presidents who oversee different corners of the country to garner regional insights the brand deployed on a mass scale through FanFest.

“They’re doing everything, from showing up at state fairs to the rodeo … it’s impossible for a centralized unit to know all of these things that matter,” Kelly said. “The investments we’ve made is, one, putting the right people in these positions to make us more strategically positioned to be relevant.

“Acting local, thinking local and being in the market, it’s just a shift for us as a company.”

Those insights influenced how Verizon organized each FanFest watch party, including the food it served, the music it played and which NFL stars attended. It hosted performances from the Rams Mariachi band and Texans Gameday presentation team and hired local DJs such as DJ Infared, DJ Jay Ejercito and DJ Split Second Sound at select locations. 

Local chefs including chef Stacey Weber, who oversees culinary operations for the Arizona Cardinals, and chef Rocco Whalen, owner of Cleveland-based restaurant Fahrenheit, prepared food in their respective cities. Fans also got access to exclusive memorabilia related to their city’s team.

It marked the first time the brand hosted localized events simultaneously around the country.

Organizing FanFest was a “logistical maze,” Kelly said, noting that the brand had historically focused on localizing events to the city hosting the Super Bowl. The brand began by targeting some of the most challenging markets, including Los Angeles (SoFi Stadium), Miami (Hard Rock Stadium) and New Jersey/New York (MetLife Stadium), and put all our efforts there to build those out,” he said. “Those became the framework for everybody else.”

More than 40,000 people attended FanFest, according to Verizon. Customers were able to claim free tickets on a first-come, first-served basis via the Verizon FanFest website. On Sunday, the brand posted photos from its House of Verizon event in New Orleans on Instagram.

While Verizon intends to purchase in-game ads in future years, it may replicate FanFest for other sports, Kelly said. 

“Regardless of if we replicate it entirely or not, there will be elements and pieces of this that we take and incorporate in other marketing initiatives,” he said.