Somewhere between the first ticket purchase and the final prop bet, $20.2 billion changed hands.
That was the projected spending around this year’s Super Bowl on food, drinks, apparel, tickets, streaming and festivities, with nearly $2 billion more in legal wagers in the United States on everything from the final score to which celebrities would attend. About 70,000 fans packed the stadium. More than 125 million more streamed from home. And every one of those transactions had to work instantly, invisibly and at a scale that would strain any system not built for the moment.
Welcome to the Experience Economy, a concept first named in a 1998 Harvard Business Review paper that has since become a defining feature of consumer behavior. Consumers are spending on participation, not possession, placing greater weight on how moments unfold than on what they own afterward. For payments…
