For a long time companies used various initiatives surrounding the Super Bowl to promote themselves, given that the Super Bowl is one of the biggest annual marketing events. Plenty of big brands and corporations commit large budgets to create and air their ads during the biggest game of the season, such as the ones in the examples below. However, even if a company doesn't invest a big budget into an ad during that period, it's still able to use this event to generate more attention from consumers, and achieve other marketing goals.
Monday.com
During the first half of the Super Bowl, the workflow operating system Monday.com was running their ad with a spot buy that reached about 30 million viewers in key markets including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The brand's core ad message was "Work without limits", which was derived from the company's IPO campaign in 2021. The goal of the promotional campaign was to inspire employees at every level, instead of only focusing on executive-level decision-makers. With the campaign, the company reached a wide audience for its B2B technology and supported the low code/no code movement.
In the last few years, the brand has been growing by acquiring a number of enterprise accounts and becoming a household name. With the biggest sporting event of the season, the company finally had its captive audience while rolling out in 9 new markets with the new promotional campaign. Back in 2014, Monday.com was only utilizing $50 ads on social media platforms, so the latest promotional campaign from the company, which involves a marketing team of around 90 people, as well as content writers, designers, and video creators, is a big step up from all those years ago.
Coinbase
The popular cryptocurrency exchange platform decided to make its Super Bowl debut this year with a clever QR code that ended up becoming a bit more popular than the company could handle. When the ad was airing during the Super Bowl, people started scanning the QR code with their phones, which temporarily overloaded the Coinbase app. When scanning the code, viewers were taken to a landing page that offered a limited promotion of $15 worth of free Bitcoin if they signed up as a new user, as well as a $3 million giveaway for everyone involved. Although the platform had to go offline for a while, the promotional period lasted long enough that any of the interested viewers could join in and get their prize.
Ricola
The Swiss cough drop and breath mint manufacturer has tried to reposition itself as an everyday brand over the last year. That's why the brand decided to create a number of short video clips for social media platforms throughout the Super Bowl, instead of creating one big ad that would be shown during the big game. The brand decided to show consumers how their throat drops could be beneficial for everyday use, such as for helping sports fans save their voice while cheering during games. This proved to be an effective campaign for Ricola.
Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5W.
