The Arizona Bowl is wrapping up its first decade of existence and, during that time, it has donated 100% of its net proceeds to charitable organizations in and around its host city of Tucson. It has the second-largest economic impact of any event in Tucson—behind only the city’s gem and mineral show, the world’s largest—and it has contributed to more than 70 charities throughout southern Arizona. Last year, 15 groups relied on the revenue the bowl created from ticket and concession sales.
That fundraising goal made innovation and publicity essential throughout the bowl’s existence. In 2015, before non-linear broadcast was much of a consideration for bowl games, the Arizona Bowl announced that it was going to focus on digital distribution and stream its debut game on the now-defunct Campus Insiders. With help from sports media, marketing, and technology company Playfly, the bowl drew Barstool Sports as a sponsor in 2021 and retained its investment despite having to scrap that year’s installment when Boise State’s team contracted Covid-19.
At the end of Barstool’s term in 2023, Playfly floated Snoop Dogg and his Gin & Juice brand as a bowl sponsor. Gin & Juice put together partnerships with World Wrestling Entertainment, Major League Baseball’s New York Mets and Yankees, and Liverpool FC’s Virgil van Dijk, but this one would make it the first alcohol sponsor for a bowl game and make Snoop Dogg the bowl’s name sponsor, as Jimmy Kimmel and Rob Gronkowski had been for the L.A. Bowl.
Snoop Dogg brought Master P and members of his Snoop Youth Football League—which helped produce reigning National Football League Offensive Rookie of the Year C.J. Stroud—to last year’s Arizona Bowl and sat them among the more than 30,000 people in attendance. The Arizona Bowl and Playfly, meanwhile, pitched a Snoop-forward approach to the Gin & Juice sponsorship to the bowl’s partners in the Mountain West and Mid-American conferences and school presidents and boards.
Considering the popularity of Snoop from recent stints as a judge on The Voice and Olympic Games announcer and torchbearer, the Arizona Bowl and its partners at Playfly channeled Arizona Diamondbacks president and CEO Derrick Hall’s find-a-way-to-say-yes (FAWTSY) customer service policy and convinced partners to buy in.
“We’re not going to just bring in a brand that devalues those conferences and devalues those teams—we want to do it with the right partner,” said Jesse Hendershot, senior director of corporate partnerships at Playfly. “It really, really helped with Snoop being the face of it, coming along for the ride and not just slapping his name on there.”
