Case Study: Visit Detroit Partners With Advance Travel & Tourism to Drive Record NFL Draft Attendance

Detroit, and the state of Michigan, was honored by being awarded the host city designation for the 2024 NFL Draft, originally announced in March of 2022. While Detroit was no stranger to hosting major national sporting events, including multiple Super Bowl games, the NFL Draft is unique in its ability to drive tremendous economic impact over the course of three days of fan engagement. According to the NFL, draft events have stimulated $160 million – $220 million in economic impact in recent years.

Visit Detroit, the city’s convention and tourism bureau, led the charge of bringing awareness and fan engagement to the state, with the goal of driving maximum attendance and economic influence to the city’s tourism partners. Not only did Visit Detroit want to drive attendance but offer an experience for new visitors to the region that was user friendly – helping guests to navigate transportation options, along with a hub to explain fan experiences, lodging, and other regional attractions.

Visit Detroit looked to MLive Media Group and Advance Travel and Tourism to leverage our statewide reach and significant first-party data to build a high-frequency campaign meant to bring exceptional awareness to the region about the event, and the offer to our readership that attendance to the event was at no charge. In addition, our extensive sponsored content network was leveraged in markets such as Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia to ensure these other major NFL markets were offered the opportunity to plan a Detroit trip for the draft.

For the promotional period of March 15th – April 27th, the campaign executed on MLive.com (and select partner sites in other markets) delivered over 4.3 million impressions, 6,600+ clicks, a 2.77% ad interaction rate, and most importantly, 25,000 hours of brand exposure for the NFL Draft and Visit Detroit.

While campaign delivery metrics are great, the true performance of event marketing is attendance – and Detroit blew away even the most optimistic expectations from that aspect. The 2024 NFL Draft was attended by over 775,000 fans, eclipsing the previous attendance record from 2019, where Nashville hosted 600,000 fans for its event. Detroit’s draft event projects to outpace initial estimates of $175 million in economic impact.