5 things marketers can learn from the Super Bowl

If you haven’t heard about Super Bowl 2022, where have you been?

The highly-anticipated championship game was between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals, held at SoFi Stadium in California. The halftime show will likely go down in history, featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J Blige, and 50 Cent. An absolute joy for anyone who fondly remembers the late 90’s and early 00’s.

But the Super Bowl is also renowned for its commercials, which have featured some of the most memorable adverts in history from brand giants such as Coca Cola, Budweiser, Snickers, and Google.

But with Super Bowl commercial slots going for $millions, this level of advertising just isn’t attainable for most brands.

So, let’s take a look at what marketers can learn from the Super Bowl so that they can emulate the success of these advertisements in their own campaigns. For a much smaller cost.

Data is your best friend

Super Bowl commercials don’t come cheap.

In fact, each commercial costs roughly $7million. Wow.

So it’s understandable that before a brand spends such a significant amount, they want to know that their commercial is going to make an impact. But this can be a challenge when Super Bowl audiences come from a huge variety of demographics with differing interests.

Cue data.

Data is the marketer’s best friend when it comes to successfully executing any targeted campaign. Of course, marketers can begin with data from their past campaigns. Such as the channels, topics, and products that created the most engagement, website visits, purchases, or online mentions.

But even better, marketers can dive into data on their target audience. Such as their demographics, online behaviour, purchases, and conversations to ensure they are hitting the mark and tailoring their campaign to suit what their audience wants to see and where they want to see it.

By creating campaigns that are highly appealing to their audience. Not only are they grabbing their immediate attention, but they will have a campaign that will become memorable. Helping to create both short and long term brand awareness.

Leverage emotions

Forrester Research has found that emotions have a significant influence on customer loyalty. Even more so than how easy a brand is to engage with, or the user experience of their product.

Marketers know that events such as the Super Bowl are supercharged with emotion. Many viewers will be rooting for their favourite team, hosting parties, and staying tuned to watch the halftime show.

This type of highly engaged state is the perfect moment to appeal to consumers’ need to feel, whether that be to laugh, to cry, or to take a moment and pause.

By triggering the desired emotions in their audience, brands can align themselves with their audience’s morals and values, they can embed powerful memories of their brand, and they can also encourage purchases. As whilst consumers are becoming increasingly savvy, many purchasing decisions are still ruled by emotions.

Be current

This brings us neatly to the importance of being current in marketing.

As mentioned, emotion can empower brands to align themselves with what their audience finds most important. And for many, current affairs are key to their own beliefs and values.

With many consumers having their fingers on the pulse of the latest news, politics, and social movements, brands have to keep up. Whether that be showing support for the causes they genuinely care about, using language that resonates with their audience, referencing the latest viral trends, or showing awareness of the latest movements.

Brands who fail to acknowledge current affairs can come across as lacking empathy, something that is key to modern marketing. Younger consumers are passionate about human rights, the environment, and social justice. And they are also savvy to old-school sales techniques.

Brands that fail to incorporate this changing consumer behaviour into their campaigns will quickly fall behind the competition and look outdated.

Image Source – Adage.com

Focus less on the product

This step may seem counterintuitive. But stay with us.

Colgate launched their first-ever Super Bowl ad in 2019. It ran for 30 seconds and is estimated to have cost Colgate a whopping $5million. And guess what? They didn’t even promote their products. In fact, there was zero mention of their product until the very end.

Instead, Colgate promoted the importance of conserving water.

“Why?!” you may ask

So far in this blog post, we have talked about understanding audiences, using emotion, being current, showing empathy. All of the above is difficult to achieve by launching a hard-sell campaign. Instead, Colgate wanted to focus on building brand awareness and brand loyalty.

By focusing less directly on the product and more on product associations, such as the benefits and values, brands can promote a bigger, more significant picture of themselves which is more likely to lodge in people’s minds, long term.

Engage on multiple channels

Super Bowl broadcast advertisements may be some of the most desired marketing opportunities that exist, but that doesn’t mean that brands who advertise in this space only do so on one channel.

Instead, these brands utilise multiple channels to execute fully integrated and connected marketing campaigns. Treating the Super Bowl broadcast as a launchpad for wider conversation and engagement.

Many brands actually choose to preview their campaigns ahead of time, utilising social media and influencers to share teasers of the campaigns before they are officially live.

And once their ad is launched, the conversation will really take off. Brands need to be on every channel that their audience is. And continuously engaging in the discussion. As well as social networks, this will also involve sending promotional emails, amending the website to reflect their ad, and even creating resource centres off the back of the campaign.

In fact, some of the most memorable Super Bowl campaigns weren’t even aired via television. Oreo, for instance, were responsible for one of the most memorable Super Bowl campaigns with their “Dunk in the Dark” social posts.

In the midst of million-dollar commercials that were running during the event, Oreo capitalised on the 2013 Super Bowl power outage by simply sending out the following timely tweet:

The tweet generated over 13,000 retweets and their Facebook post gathered more than 20,000 likes. And the campaign still today goes down as one of the best marketing moments in history.

Do you want to make a big impact with your marketing campaigns?

At Pure360 we have helped brands from all industries to create stand-out, industry-leading campaigns with the help of our all-in-one AI email & web marketing platform, alongside our experienced Customer Success Team.

Get in touch to learn how we can help you.