Getting in the game for a ‘bargain’: How brands hacked the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is a high-stakes gamble for attention.

For marketers, typical buy-in requires a media buy to the tune of at least $7 million, creative production costs, talent fees, and the faith that, in spite of the intense competition for 125 million viewers’ attention, your ad will stand out to make it all worth it.

Some, though, place their bets while circumventing the TV Super Bowl stage entirely.

“People are always looking for a bargain, and marketers fall into that category, too,” Allen Adamson, co-founder of brand consultancy Metaforce, told us. “‘Isn’t there a way to get the Super Bowl for less?’ You can get a piece of it for less. How small that piece is, and is it any good, is the question.”

How brands go about getting that bargain varies. Some opt for a regional ad buy in the hopes that doing so could generate some buzz, which media companies TBPN and 404 Media did, as well as drink brands like Garage Beer and Bum Energy, which also hosted an activation in that same market that it bought a spot, St. Joseph, Missouri. Others sat out the broadcast entirely, but still worked with recognizable talent on social campaigns in the hope that they’d stand out on consumers’ smallest screens.

DoorDash, for example, tapped entertainer, recent documentary producer, and famous troll 50 Cent, for a social campaign that leaned into his hater persona called “Beef 101.” The brand was building on a “core strategic insight from social,” Zaria Parvez, head of social at DoorDash, told Marketing Brew; last fall, when Nicki Minaj and Cardi B were arguing on X, DoorDash tweeted, “we have beef… available on DoorDash.” It went viral, and the idea for this year’s campaign was born.

“People responded really positively to it,” Parvez told us. “It also was a good value prop, because it showed that [we] don’t just have takeout. We have groceries and all these things. And so we were like, ‘How do we build [on] this viral social moment?’ We were thinking about a social-first Super Bowl.”

Building on social momentum is one approach to working with talent on an outside-the-game campaign. Kraft Mac & Cheese, for example, worked with comedian John Mulaney to make “50 ads…about Super Bowl ads” throughout the night, Todd Kaplan, CMO, North America, at The Kraft Heinz Company, explained in a post on LinkedIn. Avocados from Mexico, meanwhile, worked with comedian Rob Riggle on an interactive prediction tool powered by AI.

While a social push might not be as splashy—or costly—as an in-game spot, it can still break through, and this past Sunday was one of the “best Super Bowl sales day[s] in DoorDash history,” Parvez said.

“We saw like 50,000 orders of ground beef on Super Bowl Sunday, because our theme was, ‘50 brings the beef,’...I don’t think we were aiming to sell ground beef, but it happened,” he said. “I think it showed that you can get featured on these best ad lists. You can get these impressions. You can still have that business impact without necessarily needing to buy a spot in the Super Bowl.”

Veteran outsider

Over the years, Skittles has upped the ante with its bizarre outside-the-game efforts. In 2018, Skittles made a Super Bowl ad starring David Schwimmer that just one teenage fan ended up seeing. That remains true to this day—those who work on the brand say they still haven’t seen the ad, said Ashley Gill, Mars’s VP of brand and content marketing, North America. In 2019, the candy brand put on an anti-advertising Broadway musical starring Michael C. Hall.

This year, Skittles worked with grocery-delivery app GoPuff to bring its Super Bowl production to a contest winner’s home, performing the ad, which stars Elijah Wood, live for them—and those tuning in on YouTube.

For Skittles, the outsider approach fits with its brand ethos. “Skittles as a brand is really all about delivering an escape from common sense or a pleasantly perplexing escape from reality,” Gill said. “And so while other brands are buying a traditional ad in the game, Skittles would obviously take a very different approach.”

Being “talked about in culture” in the lead-up to the game is one of the ways that the Skittles team knows its outside-the-game efforts are worthwhile, Brian Culp, group creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day Chicago, told Marketing Brew. (Some creative teams who were previously members of DDB are now at TBWA\Chiat\Day Chicago following Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG, and serve previous DDB clients like Skittles.) In the case of this year’s effort, there was a commerce component, too—the contest was designed to encourage Skittles purchases, and ahead of the game, the brand tracked “some jumps in sales,” he told us.

Katie Bero, group creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day Chicago, said she believes Skittles almost “invented” the idea of hacking the Super Bowl with its 2018 effort. But for it to work, she added, it requires a commitment to the bit at a time “where every ad is trying to be the greatest thing in the world.”

That said, running an outside-the-game approach isn’t a guarantee, and Skittles has run ads during the Super Bowl before and would consider doing so again. The brand’s history of the unexpected, though, allows for room to continue outside-the-game efforts—or find a way back in.

“We have permission to push the boundaries a bit and bring ideas to the table and explore ideas that have never been done before or are not necessarily expected,” Gill said.