in automated payroll
workers onboarded and accessing pay
full-time administrative staff
The Super Bowl isn’t just a football game—it’s a massive live entertainment event. With over 100,000 attendees and nearly 140 million television viewers, executing a production of this scale is no small feat.
That’s where Backlit comes in. As a live events staffing agency, Backlit helps bring large-scale productions to life, supporting concerts, sporting events, award shows, films, television shows, and more. Backlit operates mass participation events on the biggest of stages.
For the Superbowl, Backlit provides staffing multiple major events including:
For Superbowl LIX, which is Backlit’s 19th consecutive booking of this project, they onboarded 1,200+ workers who worked 500,000+ hours. And come Monday morning, everyone expects to get paid.
“Every non-union person working the Superbowl Halftime Show is employed by Backlit and has their pay run through Zeal.”
Staffing at this scale and pace is challenging, but finding motivated workers is even harder—that’s where Backlit excels. They prioritize a delightful worker experience, ensuring people show up ready and able to do their best work. Since projects are short, ranging from a day to weeks, Backlit makes sure onboarding and payroll is fast and hassle-free.
In the early days, Backlit relied on manual onboarding processes and outsourced their pay to an employer of record (EOR). According to CEO, Rustin Jessen:
“We would send over a spreadsheet to our employer of record. They would manually input time, and it would be full of errors.”
Even after refining and simplifying the process, workers would get paid incorrectly or checks would take an absurdly long time to arrive. Rustin knew that not only was this a bad worker experience, but it also posed compliance risks.
“Zeal has given us the ability to operate as the employer of record and that has unlocked a new product line and a bunch of business for us, which has been really great.”
Backlit was ready for a more mature and modern way to handle their staffing operations. They wanted a solution that:
After a thorough assessment of all the options available they decided to partner with Zeal because of the robust and simple API, white-label components, automation, and flexibility of the platform.
“We thought about building payroll ourselves but it’s not in our wheelhouse and just way too big.”
Unlike traditional payroll providers, which are designed for steady, year-round employment with a few high-volume spikes, Zeal’s flexible and configurable platform can handle short bursts of high-volume staffing—perfect for the live events industry.
With Zeal’s automated and flexible onboarding and pay solutions, Backlit transformed its operations with:
“These people who show up and work short term events need the money, and I hated that we treated them poorly because we were stuck dealing with someone else’s constraints. Backlit exists to make it better for the workers and the operators. If I can keep the workers happy, the show is better."
With Zeal, Backlit can now:
“Because our operating managers are temporary, the same way our staff is, everything needs to be automated or dead simple.”
Now that Backlit has their operations streamlined and automated they are expecting to support additional large scale live events and continue to grow quickly. As part of their mission to create a better experience for their workers they are exploring new solutions to make their lives easier including a mobile app to access pay information, and ways to help workers get paid more quickly.
“It drove me crazy that I was doing the majority of the work collecting all of the data, and then handing off a spreadsheet for someone else to run payroll, that was costly and riddled with errors. While it’s a bonus that working with Zeal is cheaper, it’s really about using a modern solution that is error-free and creates a better worker experience.”
Rustin Jessen
CEO of Backlit
Share this:
Zeal is a financial technology company, not an FDIC insured depository institution. Banking services provided by Bangor Savings Bank, Member FDIC. FDIC insurance coverage protects against the failure of an FDIC insured depository institution. Pass-through FDIC insurance coverage is subject to certain conditions.
Mastercard® Debit Card is issued by Bangor Savings Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to license by Mastercard International Incorporated. Mastercard is a registered trademark, and the circle design is a trademark of Mastercard International Incorporated. Spend anywhere Mastercard is accepted.
