An effort is underway to get Super Bowl visitors to notice Monterey County before and after the Big Game.

Pam Marino here, sharing that as our neighbors to the north in Santa Clara are getting ready for the Super Bowl on Sunday, here in Monterey County the tourism and hospitality industry is kicking off an effort to grab some of the spotlight to entice future visitors.

Actually, the kick-off has been in motion for more than a month, as Rob O’Keefe, president and CEO of See Monterey, and Jennifer Chiesa, director of public relations, tell me. With the Super Bowl approaching, they brainstormed some ways to reach current and future travelers, enticing them to come to Monterey, “just down the road” from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, O’Keefe notes.

O’Keefe says the visitors and convention bureau is treating the Super Bowl as the beginning of the road to “our ultimate championship,” the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which starts just four days after the game. To do that, they started work well over a month ago to reach travelers, including a younger demographic.

Chiesa suggested they collaborate with two San Francisco 49er wives, Claire Kittle (George Kittle) and Kristin Juszczyk (Kyle Juszczyk), who have a very popular YouTube show, Wife’d Up Mic’d Up, with over 2 million followers across their social media channels.

At the end of December—back when the 49ers were still in the running to play in the Super Bowl—the two came to the Monterey Peninsula, filming themselves at the luxury resort Casa Palmero in Pebble Beach, getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, eating at Dametra Cafe in Carmel and hitting some balls at The Hay. They also dined off-camera at Stillwater, inside the Lodge at Pebble Beach.

“We definitely need to bring the boys back here, they’re so jealous,” Kittle said, standing with Juszczyk outside of the Lodge at the end of the video, which so far has more than 240,000 views.

One of the goals of the outreach is to let people know just where Monterey County is and how close it is to destinations such as the San Francisco Bay Area. There are, after all, 1,000 new hotel rooms coming online in the next decade that need to be filled. Over 300 rooms have just opened in the last month between the Kimpton Mirador in Pacific Grove and the dual-branded Marriott Courtyard and Residence Inn in Sand City.

Hotel owners are looking forward to a strong occupancy rate for the Pro-Am weekend, which also includes Valentine’s Day and a three-day holiday for President’s Day, but the point of the recent outreach is about more than just filling rooms—which in turn fills the coffers of local municipalities and boosts surrounding businesses—it’s about broadening the reach of Monterey County’s brand to travelers, O’Keefe says.

He teased about Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs playing in the Pro-Am as a special guest, and whether his famous fiance, Taylor Swift, might make an appearance.

“We hope to see both of them here,” O’Keefe says. “It would bring more excitement, more spectacle and more excitement around our Monterey brand.”

See Monterey has other plans to expand the brand. Yesterday, Thursday, Feb. 5, the bureau announced a new initiative, “Monterey 1000,” a year-long storytelling effort exploring more than 1,000 years of the county’s history, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the United States.

Here’s to the Big Game, and hopefully a big win for the county’s hospitality industry.