About 70,000 people attend the Super Bowl each year, and the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, the site of this year’s game, can hold up to 76,468 fans.

But brands activating around the big game, including Verizon, Hellmann’s, and Dove, are looking to connect with far more than the average stadium capacity’s audience. From food festivities to social good–motivated events, a variety of brands are leaning into the experiential marketing boom and taking their efforts to the ground.

“Our target is to have a bigger event than the Super Bowl,” Nick Kelly, head of partnerships at Verizon, told Marketing Brew. “Super Bowl is at 70-some-thousand. We’d like to be at 80+.”

To NOLA and beyond: When the Verizon team began planning for this year’s Super Bowl campaign back in September, it wanted to “take a national platform like the Super Bowl and make it feel local,” Kelly said. So was born the brand’s first-ever Super Bowl FanFest, a free event targeted toward families and young people that brings game-day celebrations to stadiums and venues in 30 different NFL markets, including New Orleans.

“We feel pretty good about this, but it definitely is a far larger lift than I think any of us anticipated,” Kelly said. “But the dividends will hopefully pay off immediately coming out of the Super Bowl.”

Continue reading here.—JN

Watching several hours of football in one sitting is thirsty work. Maybe that’s why Super Bowl viewers are nearly guaranteed to see at least one soda ad in the game every year.

In recent years, though, the Super Bowl landscape has looked a little different for carbonated beverages. In 2023, Apple Music replaced Pepsi as the halftime show sponsor after a decade, and last year, prebiotic-soda brand Poppi threw its hat in the ad ring for the first time. In the broader beverage category, traditional soda brands will now also be competing with canned-water brand Liquid Death as it makes its Super Bowl debut in 2025—not to mention all those beer commercials.

For PepsiCo, which owns soda brands like Mountain Dew, Mug, and Starry, the Super Bowl is still a must, even without Pepsi sponsoring the halftime show, according to Stacy Taffet, SVP of marketing for PepsiCo Beverages North America.

“Our whole goal is to make our brands authentically connect with people at the right moments, the right times, and a moment like the Super Bowl…is also one of the only times a year people are really engaging with advertising,” Taffet told Marketing Brew. “It’s like a dream come true because people care about ads and they’re talking about brands, and that makes it a lot more effective. Even though it costs a lot, obviously an extraordinary amount, to advertise in the Super Bowl, the return is there.”

Golden ticket: PepsiCo’s Super Bowl ads date back to the ’80s, spanning iconic campaigns from Cindy Crawford’s commercial for Diet Pepsi in the ’90s to the “Puppy Monkey Baby” spot for Mountain Dew in 2016 to “Michael Bublé vs Bubly” in 2019.

But not all of its brands can have the Super Bowl spotlight every year. How do PepsiCo execs choose the star of the show? “We arm wrestle,” Taffet joked.

Read more here.—AM

Celebrities are no stranger to the Super Bowl ad stage. This year, Pringles is bringing some famous moustaches in pop culture to the forefront.

The stackable chip brand, helmed by its moustachioed mascot, Mr. P, is making its eighth appearance in the big game, and this time, he’ll be alongside celebrities well-known for their facial hair: actor Nick Offerman, NBA star James Harden, and Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, plus some heartthrob energy brought by Adam Brody and Mr. Potato Head.

The ad, set to a parody of the ’60s Batman TV show theme song, marks the first time Pringles has leveraged a fuller celebrity cast at the Super Bowl, and it was important to be intentional about who to include beyond just their famous facial hair, according to Sarah Reinecke, Kellanova’s US VP of marketing, salty snacking.

“We wanted to borrow celebrities that were famous for their ’staches,” Reinecke told Marketing Brew. “We also wanted some talent that just really brought a lot of different audiences together.”

Funny guys: Pringles worked with FCB on the ad’s creative, and while the brand prioritized getting celebrities with moustache authority, the agency brought “really unexpected breakout humor,” Reinecke said. In the production process, the stars of the ad also shot behind-the-scenes spots designed specifically for social media.

It’s all part of what Reinecke calls Pringles’s “60 days of Super Bowl” approach, which expands the team’s efforts beyond its single Super Bowl spot. The team also has plans to continue running the ad in different formats, including an extended version, through the first half of the year.

Continue reading here.—JN

Stories we’re jealous of.

• Vox wrote about food branding trends and why pickle-laden products are seemingly everywhere.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about the companies that are using apartment complexes to promote their brands.
• Business Insider wrote about why so many creators are getting into podcasting.