Top Stories

By the time the Super Bowl lands in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on February 8, months of game planning will come down to one day of action. Two teams will have survived the NFL’s gridiron gauntlet. Ad agencies and brands around the country will watch eagerly for their 30 seconds of glory. 

And Broncos — the Santa Clara variety, since Denver’s participation is still TBD — will have a hand in making this worldwide spectacle a success. Meet three of them below.

The Stories

Griselda Ramirez has the enviable yet daunting task of pitching and creating videos featuring Super Bowl halftime performer Bad Bunny. Ramirez, a Leavey School of Business undergraduate alumna who double-majored in marketing and Spanish before pursuing a master’s degree in journalism, has a history with this sort of work with both ESPN and the NFL. She produced elaborately staged interviews with Rihanna for 2023’s Super Bowl, for example.

Ramirez joined the NFL full-time as entertainment and initiatives producer in November 2025. Her storytelling supports the league’s varied initiatives, from the Salute to Service veterans appreciation campaign to observances such as Black History Month and Hispanic Heritage Month. Given the scale of the Super Bowl, her work ramps up in the months leading up to it.

“So much of it comes down to preproduction and planning,” Ramirez says. She has limited time with a worldwide megastar like Bad Bunny, who is on tour even while prepping for the event. “I spend a lot of time pitching story ideas and content proposals to his people, to Roc Nation [his record label], to Apple Music. It’s a lot of planning and strategy before we even get to the storytelling.”

Ramirez relies not only on her journalism experience but also on her Leavey marketing education to craft both her pitches and stories. Beyond the Super Bowl, she spends the rest of her year creating athlete profiles and fascinating features on sports figures such as the first woman to become an NFL scout. She has a keen sense of the human elements that make a story compelling, since those same elements drew her to sports in the first place.

“A lot of the time, we look at athletes as untouchable and not human,” she says. “It's always my point to dig into what makes them so hungry for a sport. What's their motivation, what's their drive? When we look in the right place, we find really interesting stories about these people.”

The Data

The content that Ramirez and other creators produce often is informed by audience insights. That’s where Elizabeth Commaroto’s work comes into play.

Commaroto earned her economics degree from Santa Clara University, including coursework at the Leavey School of Business.  She was always interested in sports — her uncle was a team doctor for the Denver Broncos — but assumed she was headed for a career in banking. Then she fell in love with consumer insights research.

Commaroto’s experience helping brands such as Lindt chocolate expand in varied markets helped her land a job with the NFL, where she is a global consumer insights manager. “My focus and my objective at the NFL is to help understand our international fans,” she says.

The league has several high-priority markets outside the U.S., including the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Spain and Brazil. Commaroto helps run a fan tracker tool designed to measure knowledge, sentiment and engagement among people in these emerging markets.

“Sometimes it’s about simple awareness when breaking into new markets,” she says, “From our tracker, we've learned that participation is a really big entry point into the NFL, so flag football is something that all of our international markets are really pushing.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the top driver and first touchpoint for most global fans is the Super Bowl itself. So NFL marketing teams around the world use insights from Commaroto to develop education campaigns about the ins and outs of the sport around Super Bowl time, for instance. Commaroto also helps the NFL measure the effectiveness of its yearly “brand spot,” a high-profile house ad for the league that has focused on international topics in recent years.

“I work with the ad teams to test the spot and see how it's performing, and if we're actually moving the needle on the KPIs that we're hoping to,” Commaroto says. “That has been one of my main roles in doing research for the Super Bowl, and it has been really fun. I don't know yet what the ad is this year, but you'll see in less than a month.”

The Tech Stack

As a longtime martech expert, Tanusri Jammalamadaka develops and supports the “tech stack” that helps both storytellers such as Ramirez and data-minded folks such as Commaroto.

“My challenge is to connect millions of passionate football fans to the right messaging and communications in the right form at the right time, and through the right channel,” she says. Jammalamadaka brings her extensive background on the martech product side at Adobe and elsewhere to that challenge. She’s also adding new knowledge by pursuing an executive MBA at the Leavey School of Business.

Part of the challenge of fan engagement comes from the fractured environment in which fans have many choices to make — not just which team to support, but also which streaming platform to use, which stories to read or watch, and more. Smart marketing requires understanding not only the content of messaging, but also the timing, the platforms, the frequency and countless other factors. 

"What I learned at Leavey is that you don't win against substitutes by producing more content," she explains. "You win by being more relevant. That insight, which came directly from my strategy coursework, became the foundation for how we approached fan engagement across the entire league."

Marketing tech and tools for the league have to serve all 32 teams year-round, then be ready to spring into action when only two remain for the Super Bowl. As with storytelling, the key to success is planning far in advance.

“This is where the personalization and optimization of the technology comes into play,” Jammalamadaka says. “By the big day, we have already narrowed down our messaging for each possible team, and that prospective messaging and branding is ready to go. We know the players we want to highlight, and the cities and stories. The orchestration and personalization ensures we are ready.”