Bruce has big plans for Super Bowl 50, the
game’s golden anniversary. From the Super Bowl
logo to the paint on the field and trim on the
uniforms in select games, gold will be a theme
throughout the season.

Football coaches and players frequently claim that they have to focus on one game at a time throughout the season. But it’s much more fun to skip ahead and think about the Super Bowl.

Keith Bruce, Illinois ’87, gets to do just that, since he already knows he’ll be at the big game—he’s CEO of the Bay Area Super Bowl Host Committee.

Bruce, a longtime sports marketing professional, is in the midst of a three-year term overseeing logistics as the Bay Area prepares to host Super Bowl 50. He started working full-time in August 2013 on a game that kicks off in February 2016.

“The Super Bowl is an American institution,” Bruce said. “My job is to caretake that. To manage and deliver a world class Super Bowl for the American public and for the Bay Area.”

His staff oversees everything from marketing and sponsorships to the fan experience, media village and security. “The Super Bowl’s no longer a weekend,” Bruce said. “It’s an 8-to-10 day celebration. That’s half the length of an Olympic Games. It’s a major operation.”
And it takes a full-time staff of 35-40 employees, plus another 8,000-10,000 volunteers to pull it all together. That group will welcome two teams for a full slate of practices and media sessions, plus an estimated one million fans who Bruce says will pass through the fan village, appropriately named Super Bowl City.

Team play in sports and business

Bruce calls the Super Bowl the biggest annual sporting event in the world, but he’s worked on plenty of other high-profile events over the last 25 years.

During his eight years as president of SportsMark, he opened offices in China, South Africa, Brazil and Russia to work on logistics for various Olympics and World Cups.

Bruce is taking unprecedented steps to create regional, business and
community engagement in the milestone 50th Super Bowl. Above, left, he
has the ball in hand along with San Francisco 49ers President Paraag
Marathe, hall of Famer Jerry Rice, Peter O’Reilly with the NFl, and Santa
Clara Mayor Jamie Matthews.

That experience made Bruce a perfect candidate to spearhead the planning for an event he says will be the largest in the history of the Bay Area.

And he gets to plan the event on behalf of the region he has long called his home, along with Kimberly, his wife of 18 years, and their daughters Madeleine, 14, and Mason, 10.

Not many people have more experience in the field than he does, largely because the industry took off just as his career began. “A sports marketing degree didn’t exist in the ’80s,” Bruce said. But now it’s a booming business.

Bruce decided his sophomore year to earn a marketing degree from the business school, which led to a job at an advertising agency, and later with Gatorade.

SigEp was another important part of his education at Illinois. “The Fraternity gave me an immediate sense of place,” he said. “A home to go to away from my home. You weren’t just going to a cold dormitory every night.”

He took on leadership roles, heading up recruitment and serving as vice president, and found valuable lessons that have served him since. Specifically, he said, the chapter experience taught him the importance of collaboration and teamwork.

“We were working in teams, working together, meeting together,” Bruce said. “It’s not an individual game, it’s a team game. That obviously applies to sports, but to business too.” Now he’s combining his love for both.

The golden game

Planning this Super Bowl is especially daunting because it encompasses the entire Bay Area. The game itself will be played in the San Francisco 49ers’ home stadium, more than 40 miles south in Santa Clara. Bruce’s team has also scoped out airports and hotel rooms in neighboring San Jose and Oakland.

Bruce’s staff will market the 49ers’ and Raiders’ eight combined Super Bowl trophies as they promote the game around the region to make businesses aware of opportunities to capitalize on the influx of people.

The Super Bowl is massive every year, but the big 5-0 carries special significance.

“Fifty is a special birthday,” Bruce said, and he appreciates celebrating the game’s golden anniversary in the Golden State.

Gold will be a theme throughout the season, from the Super Bowl logo to the paint on the field and trim on the uniforms in select games.

Even as the NFL spends the year celebrating its own grandiosity, the Super Bowl will also have an altruistic element. “It is unprecedented for a Super Bowl to have such a focus on giving back to the local community,” Bruce said.

An altruistic game plan

World Cups and Olympics often invite controversy because host cities lose money, but Bruce wants to leave his region better off. “When the tents come down and everything moves on to the next market, we want to look back and have accomplished that goal of being the most giving Super Bowl ever,” Bruce said.

His host committee has created the 50 Fund, which will offer grants to nonprofits in the Bay Area. The fund is focused on benefiting youths in low income areas and promoting environmental sustainability.

“It’s an opportunity to show the world that not only can we produce a great event, but we can do it in a way that the community wins,” he said. Bruce is excited to take his horizontal view of the sports industry and zoom in on a sport he loves, to please both a national audience and his own community.

“From a local standpoint, we want people to wake up the next day and say, ‘That was an unbelievably fun experience, and the Bay Area is better off as a result of hosting Super Bowl 50.'”

And one way he’d know he did a good job: “If the NFL says, ‘We’d love to return the Super Bowl in five years,’ and the Bay Area residents immediately say, ‘We’d love to do it again!'”

“That’s what we want to hear,” Bruce said. “Let’s do it again.” Of course, it’s only natural for a Super Bowl winner to want a repeat.