Raiders Introduce New Official Mexican Airline Sponsor, Viva Aerobus, At Stadium Monday
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
Scott DeAngelo remembered the day well.
Allegiant Air’s chief marketing officer was at the Las Vegas Raiders HQ in Henderson on St. Patrick’s Day when he chatted with Raiders business executives about a potential new sponsor for the NFL team — Allegiant’s airline partner, Mexico-based Viva Aerobus.
DeAngelo pitched the Raiders on forming a sponsor relationship with Viva Aerobus, advising former Raiders executives like Dan Ventrelle and Jeremy Aguero along with the team’s business partnership and activation staffers that Viva Aerobus would be a good business partner for the NFL club. DeAngelo even recalled saying hello to the team’s head coach, Josh McDaniels, who had been hired in late January.
So just four and half months after St. Patrick’s Day and DeAngelo’s visit to Raiders headquarters, new Raiders team president Sandra Douglass Morgan and Viva Aerobus CEO Juan Carlos Zuazua were up at the Allegiant Stadium 200 level with the venue bowl as the backdrop Monday morning to officially announce that Viva Aerobus is the official Mexican airline of the Silver and Black.
“We were advocates for this,” DeAngelo said of the Raiders-Viva Aerobus sponsorship.
As LVSportsBiz.com reported last week, the Viva-Raiders airline business partnership made perfect sense because the Raiders have played three games in Mexico—regular season games versus New England in 2017 and Houston in 2016 and a 2001 preseason contest versus Dallas. And by the way, the average attendance in those three games played in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium was more than 80,000.
Plus, the Raiders maintain marketing rights in Mexico as part of the NFL’s International Home Marketing Areas (IHMA) across 10 different countries.
Like Summerlin-based Allegiant Air, Viva Aerobus prides itself on being an affordable, accessible airline. Zuazua said Viva Aerobus has 35 percent of the Mexican airline market share and plans to have flight attendants wear Raiders jerseys on the two-hour flights to Las Vegas. He noted Las Vegas is a popular destination for Viva customers.
This is the first team sponsor announcement for Douglass Morgan, who hit the national TV circuit after Raiders owner Mark Davis appointed her as team president to replace Marc Badain, who left in July 2021. Ventrelle filled in as interim president.
In the pre-COVID pandemic days of 2019, Badain was holding press releases all the time to announce stadium founding partners like Allegiant, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, local Ford dealers, MGM Resorts and others. The Raiders did not release terms of the Viva Aerobus deal.
Thanks to the public-subsidized stadium and more than a dozen founding partnerships, the Raiders went from last in corporate sponsorship revenues in the NFL to among the top five. The Raiders already had a sponsorship deal with Mexican beer, Modelo.
