Who just agreed to advertise on the Sphere?
The Raiders now have one of the biggest football helmets anyone has ever seen on the big screen in Las Vegas.
The Silver and Black’s headgear has joined the 31 other National Football League teams as the centerpiece of the Sphere’s first brand advertising campaign for the NFL Sunday Ticket television package on YouTube.
The ad campaign — the first ever for Sphere — began Friday morning and is scheduled to run through the opening of the 2023 football season, which begins Thursday.
Sphere Entertainment did not disclose financial details of the contract.
As part of that campaign, YouTube created an animation that will transform the 4-acre exterior of the Sphere into the helmets of all 32 teams.
“I can’t wait to see how NFL fans react once they see their team on the biggest LED screen in the world,” Guy Barnett, senior vice president of brand strategy and creative development at Sphere Entertainment, said in a news release.
Sphere technicians have prepared some advertising content for major brands to test the capabilities of the venue, but the YouTube NFL Ticket was the first one used in that capacity. A massive basketball was produced on the venue during the National Basketball Association Summer League in Las Vegas, but that was developed as an affiliate partnership because of Madison Square Garden Sports’ relationship with the NBA through the ownership of the New York Knicks franchise that plays at Madison Square Garden.
Earlier, Sphere officials said they would split exosphere content between paid advertising and artistic elements. The exosphere was first activated on the Fourth of July with a fireworks simulation.
Bolting the high-definition screens to the exosphere took nearly a year to complete. Hundreds of 70-by-60-foot parallelogram-shaped panels with LED lighting were attached to the Sphere to produce a 580,000-square-foot spherical canvas. Overall, the exosphere has 1.2 million “hockey pucks” spaced 8 inches apart that encase 48 diodes each and are capable of displaying 256 million colors. Because the screen is programmable, the diodes can produce the illusion of movement or animation.
So far, Sphere has produced dazzling displays of planet Earth, the lunar landscape of the moon, a massive NBA basketball, an eerie eyeball, Americana and fireworks. It also has a “see-through” mode that makes the building appear invisible.
YouTube is using Sphere to promote its NFL Sunday Ticket television package, which offers out-of-market Sunday afternoon games to pro football fans.
After partnering for nearly two decades with DirecTV, the NFL announced a multiyear agreement in December to move the Sunday Ticket package to YouTube TV and YouTube Premium Channels starting this season.
“Using the exosphere’s larger-than-life canvas for a brand campaign that combines two of the most widely recognized brands — YouTube and the NFL — resulted in an immersive experience that engages audiences ahead of the start of the season and the launch of NFL Sunday Ticket,” said David Hopkinson, president and chief operating officer of MSG Sports, which oversees global marketing and brand partnerships across Sphere Entertainment and the MSG family of companies. “This activation spotlights the immense opportunity for brands on the exosphere, which has quickly become an iconic global landmark since it was illuminated earlier this summer.”
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on X.