For football fans curious to know the history of New Orleans’ Caesars Superdome—which will host Super Bowl 59 on Sunday—its homepage features an interactive timeline brimming with trivia. Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones, and Taylor Swift have packed the Superdome’s seats. Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard have boxed beneath its dome. The 50-year-old venue has also hosted no fewer than seven Super Bowls already.
So numerous are the landmark’s great moments in sports and music that it’s easy to scroll past a brief entry on the timeline dated August 29, 2005. Its text bubble reads: “Superdome serves as a ‘Refuge of Last Resort.’” The phrase only hints at the havoc that took place there.
Twenty years ago, when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans with 125 m.p.h. winds and a 28-foot storm surge, the mayor’s office herded 30,000 evacuees into the arena for want of a better plan.
Within hours, the Superdome’s electricity failed, cutting off the lights, the air conditioning, and the pumps supplying water for sinks, showers, and toilets. Food and medical supplies ran out. The temperature rose to 106 degrees, magnifying the stench from mountains of garbage. Over the ensuing days, six people died, one throwing himself off the walkway to the ground 60 feet below. A Congressional investigation later called the Superdome “a symbol of the ways in which America failed New Orleans.”
“The Superdome has a remarkable history, including a lot of really unpleasant developments after Katrina,” said Tim Calkins, associate chair of the marketing department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business. “What is amazing to me is how little people remember that, and how little it affects the brand of the Superdome.”
But a celebratory event like the Super Bowl hardly seems a suitable time to evoke the memory of a human-rights tragedy.
Or is it?
While millions of viewers aren’t old enough to remember the scenes at the Superdome in 2005 (Caesars Entertainment bought its naming rights in 2021 and had no affiliation at the time), many millions are old enough. And since the Superdome is a big brand subject to the same historical track record and reputational risk as any brand, it’s worth pondering whether memories of the Superdome’s darkest days will figure into the proceedings this Sunday.
Let’s just watch the game
The answer to that would appear to be: probably not.
“The farther that time moves forth from any event, the easier it is to start reconstruing that event in ways that align with the narrative you’d like to create for yourself,” Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed told ADWEEK. “I don’t think anyone will remember that insane human-rights tragedy. People will go see Mahomes and Swift and forget all about it.”
Jack Mackinnon, senior director of cultural insights for the Collage Group, points to some 2024 year-end research conducted by his firm that suggests that, even if older Americans are inclined to remember the Superdome’s role in Hurricane Katrina, many are so worn down by today’s sociopolitical tensions to reflect on it for very long.
“Everybody is feeling sick and tired of being in the cycle of expecting new things, expecting change, and the government underdelivering,” he said. “Everybody is feeling a sense of burnout.”
Calkins suggests that, unlike other public venues whose reputations bear the stains of past tragedies (think, for instance, the World Trade Center or Columbine High School) an arena hosts a continuous roster of upbeat events that paper over the memories of what came before.
“Brands are shaped by associations, and the only way you can get rid of a negative association is to replace it with something else,” Calkins said. “That’s what the Superdome has managed to do.”
Brand consultant David Deal agreed. Football fans watch football in part to escape the world’s problems, he said, not meditate on them.
Yet on that note, Deal added, “I think people should remember what the Superdome symbolizes in the context of race relations and the history of our country.”
An opportunity if you want it
As brands flipflop on what stances to take on diversity, equity, and inclusion—some embracing it as others distance themselves—it’s worth pointing out that the Superdome during Katrina was a microcosm of America’s uneasy relationship with its own diversity. As National Public Radio reported, most of the displaced people under that dome were poor people of color.
The political scientist Jean Hardisty observed at the time that those sent to the Superdome “were there because, in a city defined by decades of poverty, segregation, and deep disenfranchisement, poor and working-class blacks… would largely shoulder the burden of the storm.”
CMO advisor Lola Bakare, author of the recent book Responsible Marketing, argues that being conscious of the Superdome’s disturbing past is important from a humanistic point of view—and a branding one as well.
Bakare expects Super Bowl Sunday to “steer away from any human-rights issues,” despite the game “taking place in a city that has suffered the most egregious human-rights [abuses].” But though the odds on it may be long, she still hopes some advertisers will “tap into the cultural reality” of the city and “the very real emotions we have attached to what went on there” during the storm.
Difficult as the topics may be, she said, it will resonate because it remains emotional, real, and relatable to many people.
“Let’s not divorce ourselves from our humanity,” she said. “We are celebrating an American pastime full of joy at a place that is a graveyard. And when we put our heads in the sand, we are not paying our historical debts.”
