Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), the car company behind the Dodge, Jeep and RAM Trucks brands, leveraged Super Bowl LIII with a barrage of ad for its ‘Big Game Blitz’ initiative (led by a pro LA Rams themed commercial linking the team to the brand’s name) – none of which actually aired during the Big Game itself.
Indeed, the ‘Big Game Blitz’ turned out to be a ‘tease’ tactic as all the FCA commercials actually only aired on digital and social.
The teasers began rolling out on Tuesday: five days ahead of Super Bowl LIII.
These were followed 48 hours later by the digital debut of five new commercials – including the pro LA Rams ad, a spot starring Jeremy Renner and a Jeep commercial featuring the band One Direction.
Setting aside the basic tease tactic of a ‘Big Game Blitz’ that didn’t run in the Big game, for sports marketers the stand out spot was arguably ‘Rolls RAMS Roll’: which featured rams/RAMS of animal and truck variety heading for Atlanta for game day.
This 45-second ad features the new RAM HD 3500 and a giant herd of imposing, tough bighorn (CGI) rams.
The narrative climax of the storyline sees a couple arriving at an Atlanta four-way intersection in a RAM 3500 HD (pulling a trailer of course) at the same time as a huge heard of rams who have come from across the country to see their namesakes play in the Super Bowl.
Essentially this sees the auto brand capitalise on the fact that it shares its name with one of the teams in the game.
The spot was developed by agency Motive with input from Kiwi animation studio Flux Animation.
The other non Big Game, Big Game spots were ‘Can’t Remember’,
‘Make Sure Of It’,
‘More Than Just Words’,
and ‘Fourth Quarter’.
To bookend its Big Game Blitz online only strategy, immediately after the game RAM rolled out a series of short spots references real brands who advertised during the Big Game and linking them to a RAM truck through the theme how many ‘X’ can a RAM Truck carry?
“This year, we will exclusively use social and digital to showcase our commercials,” explained FCA chief marketing officer Oliver Francois.
“We decided to explore innovative ways to ride the wave of highly engaged viewers, during the one time of the year when the commercials are fun and everybody is talking about them. With this new approach, we are able to engage with the audience through more creative executions than ever before leading up to this Sunday night.”
Comment:
Super Bowl spots are reported to cost $5.5m for 30 seconds this year (up from $5.2m last year), which has to be added to production costs that also often run into the millions.
But we, like everyone else, already know it’s very, very expensive to buy Big Game spots and we also know procurement want marketers to be careful with their budgets, but haven’t we seen this Big Game campaign that didn’t have any Big Game spots before?
There have been many tactical variants of this approach: from the iconic Newcastle Brown Ale ‘If We’d Made It’ (see case study), to the cheekily smart Volvo’s ‘Greatest Interception’.
This is a tried and tested tactic.
I guess it is a guess of ‘if you can’t afford them, join them.’.
If cost cutting, sorry ‘efficiency’, is the watch word for the FCA marketing team at Auburn Hills perhaps these spots might just ride the game’s coattails to some kind of sales bump.
After all, 48 hours after its online launch YouTube views for the campaign have exceeded 6 million.
For sports marketers, it is the Roll RAMS role commercial that is worth considering carefully.
After all, leveraging the biggest single US TV event of the year – one of the few properties that by and large unites the country together – by creating a piece off content that supports just one off the two teams involved iss something of a risk.
Especially when it is based on a ‘name coincidence’ and not something more solid such as the brand being an official team sponsor or being based in the same market/city as the sports side.
An FCA statement said that it produced two endings to the spot – each one designed to mimic the real-time outcome of the game – and thus giving the brand flexibility to deliver an ad that is of-the-moment.
But the point and the cleverness of that is somewhat lost when you aren’t even actually airing the ad in the game itself anyway.
After all, anyone can roll out multiple versions online without any trouble.
Nevertheless, FCA is used to its own slice of Super Bowl.
Last year the company’s Martin Luther King Super Bowl spot generated plenty of controversy.
Links:
RAM Trucks
https://www.youtube.com/ramtrucks
https://instagram.com/ramtrucks/
Motive
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