Cedar Rapids agency helps with New York Giants' hospitality for Super Bowl

Twenty minutes before the New York Giants and their 1,800 closest friends and family members landed in Indianapolis on Monday for a week of Super Bowl festivities, Heather Smith Friedman waited at the ready.

Friedman, founding partner of Cedar Rapids' de Novo Alternative Marketing, has been working for two weeks to coordinate hospitality and transportation for the NFC side of Super Bowl XLVI this weekend.

De Novo has a contract with Game Day Management, which oversees aspects of the event for the NFL. This is the second year that Friedman has helped to coordinate some part of the biggest football game in the world.

“To be asked back is a huge honor,” Friedman said minutes before the Giants' planes landed at the Indianapolis International Airport, “and it has to be perfect. There can be no mistakes, which is why we're given a full two weeks. You have to have a Plan B for your Plan B.

“It's the freaking NFL,” she said. “There is no room for error.”

Friedman has been in Indianapolis since Jan. 19 coordinating and training staff so every member of the Giants' team and every friend and family member they bring with them gets where they need to go when they need to be there and has everything they need along the way.

Friedman has coordinated entertainment for the Giants' guests this week, setting up tours of a local winery and the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway. She's helped coordinate 31 buses for the team members and their guests, arrange police escorts, organize photo opportunities and set up child care.

She's developed multiple options for getting everyone to the game safely, and her team has developed postgame party plans A and B, depending on who hoists the Vince Lombardi Trophy on Sunday.

“At this point, we've done all the heavy lifting, and now we're watching the last two weeks of planning come together,” she said.

Should anything veer off course, Friedman and her team are prepared to respond and manage a seamless recovery.

“The moment you think you have it under control, they want to add a hotel,” she said, “but I love that sort of on-your-feet thinking.”

Friedman said she's been working 12 to 15 hours a day and doesn't expect to sleep for 24 hours after the Super Bowl. Even then, her work won't stop for another few days. She doesn't plan to return to Iowa until Feb. 8.

“It's a sense of accomplishment to know that you have come up with every possible scenario,” she said.

Friedman has represented de Novo at other Game Day Management events, including last year's Super Bowl in Dallas and the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, said Jen Neumann, Friedman's partner in de Novo.

Friedman, after coordinating staff and volunteers during last year's Super Bowl, earned more responsibility this year and was put in charge of the NFC team's hospitality, Neumann said. Friedman has relished her new role.

“I feel much closer to the heart of the game and much closer to the players,” she said. “To actually know that these teams and their wives and families and children are counting on us - you feel much closer to the center of it all.”