Photos of Rocket booth by Preston Saunders,
Courtesy of No Hot Ashes
Overview
Each year, the NFL Super Bowl Experience ratchets up the excitement when the city hosting the Super Bowl transforms a local venue into an epic interactive football theme park. This week-long, immersive experience is a major tourism draw for visitors attending the Super Bowl. Fans of all ages flock to the event that’s filled with activities for children and adults, participatory games, youth football clinics, merchandise from the NFL Shop, as well as autograph and photo sessions with current and former National Football League players.
Savvy NFL partners make the most of the tens of thousands that attend the NFL Super Bowl Experience by hosting booths on the show floor to showcase their brands.
This year, Cheshire AV had the opportunity to partner on the Rocket Super Bowl Experience activation with No Hot Ashes, an experiential direction studio, and Supper, a creative agency. As the largest retail mortgage lender in the United States, Rocket is known for its fast, technology-driven, fully online home loan process designed to simplify and accelerate the path to homeownership.
The creative teams at Supper and No Hot Ashes developed the creative concept behind the show tied to Rocket’s “America Needs Neighbors Like You” Super Bowl commercial. Cheshire was brought in to handle all AV and technology needs for their 40’ x 80’ booth at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.
What is unique about the Super Bowl Experience over a trade show is that the emphasis is on fan engagement, not trade sales, and it is achieved through immersive, football focused, hands-on experiences.
The Activation
To bring the Rocket concept to life, the booth’s central area was designed to emulate the feel of a raucous fan environment by mounting a football stadium’s halo-style jumbotron in the exhibit. Additionally, if you look at the floorplan from above, the central area emulates the Rocket logo. Curved screens, constructed from LED panels mounted on overhead rigging, faced both inward toward participants and outward toward the surrounding expo floor, maximizing visibility and draw. Beneath the screens, a semi-circular row of kiosks hosted the interactive “Dream Home Finder” arcade-style game with joysticks and buttons, developed by the creative technology team at No Hot Ashes. Gameplay at each kiosk dynamically triggered visual changes on the overhead displays while contributing to a shared scoreboard that updated in real time across all stations through synchronized, seamless browser-to-screen communication. Beyond gameplay, the LED jumbotron also highlighted key moments, spotlighting appearances by sports celebrities whenever they took the stage at Rocket’s booth. Some of the athletes who made an appearance included former and current Detroit Lions, Barry Sanders and Aidan Hutchinson, as well as Scott Hanson from NFL Red Zone.
Reinforcing Rocket’s neighborhood theme, the stage backdrop was designed as a house façade featuring “windows” made from large TV screens. When athletes were not on the stage, which was designed to look like the deck of a suburban-style house, the screens displayed interior home scenes, creating the illusion that attendees were peering into a lived-in space. The façade also concealed the booth’s back-of-house operations.
On the opposite side from the stage, a row of San Francisco-style “Painted Ladies” framed a series of enclosed photo booths, where visitors could step inside and snap locally-themed photo-strip souvenirs from their adventures at the Super Bowl Experience.
Project Execution
The full collaboration among the creative teams at Supper, No Hot Ashes, and Cheshire began roughly six weeks before the show, with key technical and production details finalized about a month prior to the event.
In the early phase, the layout for the kiosk area had a slightly different design. Structural weight limitations required the concept for the halo to be reworked to encompass three independent sections separated by pass-throughs. Despite the adjustment, the redesigned structure maintained its original design intent and effectively framed the interactive space while also attracting attention from across the show floor.
Recognizing the complexity of the installation—including the integration between kiosks, stage programming, and the overhead LED panels—the teams adopted a collaborative approach throughout planning and production, developing multiple contingency solutions in advance to ensure the onsite team could quickly address any technical or logistical challenges that might arise.
This show was a prime example of how strong inter-team trust enabled flexibility at the show and allowed content and layout changes to be handled onsite in real-time.
Internally at Cheshire, Account Manager Jesse Newcomb collaborated on this show with Matt Duelka, Cheshire’s new Production Manager. Matt had just been hired when he stepped in to manage this show. Matt’s wealth of experience as a multi-media producer and most recently, with an experiential agency gave him the strong foundation to smoothly and efficiently handle every challenge that arose, leading Pete Stam from No Hot Ashes to say, “The guy’s killer! I mean, he was jumping in and helping us with stuff that was not AV-related, right? Matt was certainly an asset onsite, for sure.”
The success of the Rocket Super Bowl Experience activation highlights the value of early collaboration, shared problem-solving, and the complementary strengths of each team involved. The process established a strong foundation for future partnerships, demonstrating how close coordination, mutual trust, and creative alignment can translate innovative ideas into impactful live experiences.
Photos by Preston Saunders, Courtesy of No Hot Ashes
Rocket Super Bowl Ad
