Once it was the in-game TV commercials that were always the hot ‘Super Bowl Marketing, media topic, but today it’s the innovative stand-out tactical stunts that garner just as many headlines.
From social and experiential, to delivery innovations, pre-game ads and apps, Super Bowl 50 certainly saw plenty of inventive and original marketing mischief.
Spanning sponsor activation, advertiser spots and ambush marketing, these are Activative’s Top 5 Super 50 Stunts.
1 > Uber & Dick’s Sporting Goods #RushMyShirt Low Latency ‘Champions Shirt’ Home Delivery
Uber (an official sponsor of the Super Bowl organising committee) teamed up with Dick’s Sporting Goods to deliver direct-to-door Super Bowl ‘Champion’ shirts to fans at home before their Big Game Party’s were even over.
And they even paid the delivery cost.
No need to wait a day or two for buy your Winners T from the FansEdge online shop, when you can get your Denver Broncos Super Bowl 50 Champions jersey delivered during your Big Game party.
The joint promise from nationwide retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods and tech-driven taxi outfit Uber promotes the latter’s new ‘UberRUSH’ service was to deliver championship T-shirts to fans immediately after the final score becomes official.
The very same champions edition T-shirts the players were wearing at the trophy presentation and in the locker room.
A courier version of Uber, UberRUSH is an on-demand delivery stardn of the fast-growing taxi app that uses messengers on foot and on bikes, not cars.
Broncos fans simply clicked to ‘Dick’s Rush My Shirt’ webpage, placed a commemorative t order and then waited a few minutes for the UberRUSH cab to arrive with the celebratory order.
Uber and Dick's rush to deliver your Super Bowl champions shirt https://t.co/xtCTN4z0wh #RushMyShirt #marketing #PR pic.twitter.com/MZdwb6ae5G
— Advantage Software (@gotoadvantage) February 5, 2016
‘For many years, Dick’s has given hometown fans the opportunity to get championship merchandise in our stores immediately following the end of the game, usually to tremendous demand,’ explained VP of brand marketing Ryan Eckel.
‘Through the UberRUSH service, we saw a unique opportunity to extend that same opportunity to fans in two of America’s biggest sports cities.’
While this taps into the ever-increasing consumer desire for low latency service and real-time response there was one problem with this service stunt.
The initiative was only running in Chicago and New York.
So it would have been fine if the Bears were playing either the Giants or the Jets.
2 > Super Bowl Pizza Wars Won By Solid Gold Pizza?
70 million Americans attend a Super Bowl party and 60% of them order pizza. So Pizza Wars break out every Super Bowl Sunday across the nation as rivals leverage the game with offers, discounts and, this year, solid gold.
The Yum brands outfit prepared to sell two million pizzas for Super Bowl 50 and its 2016 marketing activity was spearheaded by a 24 carat gold stunt.
The brand gave away a special golden version of its new Stuffed Garlic Knots pizza – that’s a pizza covered in $100 of edible 24-karat gold.
Customers (in one of the seven participating states) can win one of the 50 limited edition old pizzas simply by ordering a regular version of the pie or emailing the Pizza Hut PR team between 1 pm and 5 pm on Super Bowl Sunday.
The limited-edition pizza will be delivered in a custom, specially-designed golden box and the lucky winners will also receive a $100 Pizza Hut Gold Card.
(Seeing as the standard version costs $12.99 that’s a $212.99 return on investment).
Gilded, glittering and ready for the big game. #GoldenPizza
Learn more: https://t.co/POe5AyTLYI pic.twitter.com/PXzv2iHU1i— Pizza Hut (@pizzahut) February 5, 2016
‘It’s not every day that the Golden Anniversary of the Big Game is played in the Golden State, so we felt it was only appropriate to celebrate with a limited-edition Golden Garlic Knots Pizza,’ explains Pizza Hut marketing VP Jared Drinkwater.
This golden stunt is also an ambush on the NFL’s official pizza partner Papa John.
In the recent past Papa’s John’s has successfully aligned itself with the Super Bowl with several activation strands ranging from multiple offers, a pizza giveaway for the coin toss to in-game TV spots.
This year’s Twitter-led giveaway revolved around asking fans to follow @papajohns and look for its pizza and football emojis during the Big Game.
To enter the competition, pizza lovers simply needed to reply to @PapaJohn with a heart emoji and the #PJSWEEPSTAKES hashtag and wait for Papa John’s to respond for possible free pizza.
Another combatant in the Super Bowl pizza war is Domino’s, which this year also used viewers who followed Domino’s on Twitter the chance of winning discounted pizza, as well as web coupons and online offer-led list-building mechanics.
3 > Taco Bell’s Secret ‘Bigger Than’ Super Bowl Product Launch
With playful ‘redacted’ press releases, mysterious online videos led by minor league stars and a ‘Trust Us?’ tagline on its website, Taco Bell’s tongue-in-cheek ‘Bigger Than’ tactical campaign trumpeted a mysterious new product launch by leveraging the overblown Super Bowl hype.
In a playful PR stunt developed with agency Deutsch Los Angeles, Taco Bell began drumming up online pre-orders (see https://www.tacobell.com/) for its mysterious new offering with a tease campaign during the week before the Super Bowl and then revealing what the new product was in the Big Game.
The national and regional Super Bowl spots themselves were fairly speedy, yet straightforward affair weirdly fronted by little known stars like ‘Texas Law Hawk’ Bryan Wilson and and Giorgio Tsoukalos from the History Channel’s ‘Ancient Aliens’.
And the secret product (which actually wasn’t a secret at all as it was officially leaked) is a hybrid of a quesadilla and chalupa called a ‘quesalupa’.
Playing with the fact that every market has its own small-town big shots who are so bad they’re good, this campaign launched around the Super Bowl, but will continue through the season premiere of AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ and the Grammy Awards telecast.
The aim here was seemingly simple – generate web chatter about the mysterious offering..
Is it working?
It seems so!
The fast food giant claimed to have received ‘tens of thousands’ of pre-orders before the Big Game and it certainly generated plenty of pre-game publicity.
4 > Turkish Airlines Amplifies Alliances Promote New Flights To Gotham & Metropolis
With a pair of commercials airing during CBS’ Super Bowl pre-match programming, Turkish Airlines announced its latest flight destinations – to Gotham City and Metropolis.
The campaign tied its role as presenting sponsor of the official broadcaster’s pregame show with its media partner status as the official airline partner of the upcoming ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’ film.
The first spot features (fake) flights to Gotham City and stars billionaire Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) pitching that ‘there has never been a better time to visit our great city’.
The second ad sees Lex Luther (Jesse Eisenberg) aim to persuade travellers to fly to the recently rebuilt Metropolis.
The ads, which drive lure viewers to buy tickets on the airline’s movie partnership site http://www.turkishairlines.com/metrop…, are further evidence off the increasingly blurred lines between brand sports and entertainment partnerships.
5 > Esurance #PassItOnSweepstakes & Progressive ‘Super Bowl Clichés Ad Bingo App’ Ambushes Ads (& Official NFL Insurer Nationwide) Via Twitter
Ambushing competitor Super Bowl commercials via parallel in-ad-break Twitter campaigns has gone from last year’s cutting-edge innovation to this year’s inevitable copycat campaign tactic.
Last year it was the car category (with Volvo’s brilliant #GreatestInterception ambush and this year it was the turn of the insurance sector with Twitter distraction disruption initiatives from both Esurance and Progressive ambushing official NFL insurance partner Nationwide.
Esurance’s’s Super Bowl pregame ad ambush – in the form of a cash giveaway – generated 9,000 tweets a minute during the first quarter and trended nationwide (according to Spredfast) as its cash competition drew attention away from the TV to Twitter.
The insurer aired a 30-second pregame spot, created by agency Leo Burnett, promoting its in-game contest luring football fans to tweet the #Esurancesweepstakes hashtage to stand a chance of winning $1m.
Meanwhile fellow insurance outfit Progressive ran a Twitter ad ambush called ‘Super Bowl Spot Bingo’.
Ambushing the Big Game ads and using the TV commercials as Progressive’s campaign content, the insurer created a Super Bowl ad clichés bingo app.
And the prizes? Winners can get their rent or car payments paid for a whole year.
With 'Super-Duper Bingo,' Progressive Gets Role In Super Bowl Ads–Without The Expense @Forbes https://t.co/6XbmvUK1GY
— Dale D. Buss (@DaleDBuss) February 7, 2016
‘Last year’s Super Bowl was called the Somber Bowl, it wasn’t as much fun. There are so many clichés and predictive things you can see in the Super Bowl. We started watching 10 years of ads and we looked at those ads and we saw there’s always gonna to be a supermodel; there’s always gonna be a former athlete; there’s always gonna be a puppy; there’s always gonna be a mini horse or horse; there’s always gonna be a celebrity. The predictability of this was really intriguing to us,’ outlines said Progressive CMO Jeff Charney.
Building social Super Bowl buzz without paying for a $5m in-game spot – like these two ideas – is a go-to move for so many brands these days.
Indeed, Progressive does as far as publicly describing Super Bowl TV ads as ‘definitely not worth it for us’.
Charney argues the app idea will be more effective than a TV spot for Progressive and much cheaper too.
‘We can do this for a fraction, fraction, fraction, small, small, small, I cannot even tell you how infinitesimally small it is,’ he adds. ‘We like to zag, while other people zig. Just because we could buy a $6 million ad, doesn’t mean we should.’
Of course, if no one downloads the game app, then Progressive gets no exposure (other than a little PR) – unlike the 115 million viewers guaranteed for Big Game TV commercials.
5+ > Seahwaks’ Marshawn Lynch Retirement Tweet Wins Social Super Bowl 50 Ambush Stunt
After appearing in the NFL’s showpiece game for the last three years in a row, Seattle Seahawks star Marshawn Lynch had to sit the game out this season.
Well, sort of.
Actually the running back did appear in this year’s game as one of its biggest social medial stars and stories.
As Lynch choose to personally tweet his retirement announcement during the fourth quarter of Super Bowl 50.
His social statement may not have actually included any words, but the meaning was crystal clear – he tweeted a photo of his cleats hanging up.
Did #marshawnlynch just announce his retirement? #beastmode pic.twitter.com/WiiXw8o9TM
— 1011 The Beat (@1011thebeat) February 8, 2016
When added to the fact that many of his friends and colleagues have been talking about his plans to retire in TV interviews and across social media, the message was definitive.
With an impressive 167,000 in-game retweets, it was possibly a more successful Super Bowl social ambush than anything run by the big name brands with their big budgets and big agency teams.
Of course, part of the commercial value of retired players is their personal social following.
