Beyond the Superbowl: Leveraging Super Bowl Hype for Brand Success

113.06 million people, in the US only, watched how Patrick Mahomes took a knee for the KC Chiefs to take home the Lombardy trophy for Superbowl LVII. That was officially the end of the game, but it wasn't the end for many brands.

As soon as this happened and as the MVP trophy was being handled, I couldn't resist my need to know what had happened outside the game and get my hands on the live dashboards we had settled up back in our NY office, so I scheduled my strategic and analysis team for a meeting on Monday morning. For the ones who work with us, you all know that at MACH9 , we love data, we love measuring, and we are passionate about understanding situations and how to make them the best outcome possible. So, that Monday morning, we aimed to measure and understand the game's impact and the things around it. This article is about our findings and some examples worth sharing.

The Three Players

The Superbowl is not only for sports fans worldwide but is also an incredible moment for two other "players." Naturally, Player #1 is everything regarding the sport and teams. Player #2 is the artist performing the Half time show, and, of course, Player(s)#3 are many brands that leverage its massive momentum and spike their presence. Player #1 (well, players) have much at stake, becoming world champions. Player #2 doesn't get paid at all, and Player(s)#3 had to spend USD 7,000,000 for 30 seconds on being at the Superbowl.

Player #1: The League, The Game, and The Teams

Let's start with the overall impact during SB week, game day, and up to when we looked at the live dashboards. The hashtags #superbowl or #sblvii or Super Bowl had a mention volume online of 5.7M and a reach of 114,553,370,788. In context, we are around 8B people worldwide, so on average, each person has been exposed 14 times to any of these topics online. Of course, only some have internet access or are the age to be exposed to it, but it is a good reference on the impact the #1 major yearly event has.

When we looked at the other Player #1 related mentions, the teams/fans come to place after the game and the league. From a digital support perspective, there were more fans & cheers for the Philadelphia Eagles than for the Kansas City Chiefs. Considering that the winning team usually gets a post-game boost on congratulations and news mentions, the Eagles fans did a great job winning the "Digital Bowl."

Player #2; Rihanna and the Apple Halftime Show

This year, Rihanna was back on stage during the SB, becoming the first and only Billionaire to perform on it. As a plus, she revealed elegantly that she was pregnant, making her performance a one-of-a-lifetime moment for her, the fans, and spectators worldwide.

Here is a quick snapshot of how it looked on digital channels.

As you can see, most of the conversations regarding Rihanna happened on Twitter; 2.8M out of 2.9M volumes happened there, but what is impressive is that #rihanna was ranked 5th, only after prominent hashtags like #superbowl, #sblvii, #superbowllvii, and #nfl who are our Player #1. The main difference is that the official accounts, many brands, and fans used those football-related hashtags. At the same time, the Rihanna one has fewer audiences using it but with very high engagement and conversations around it. This was the first year 苹果 became the main sponsor of the halftime show, and they used the #applemusichalftime to gain their spot after the game-playing teams of the SB. Good for year 1.

Player #3; The Brands (where we are experts)

I'm sure you have a thousand ideas on what to do with USD 7,000,000, but when you want to showcase yourself at the Superbowl, these thousand ideas come down to one 30-second idea. So as a brand strategist, I always push my SB clients on how we can take the best advantage and use possible of those $7M. How can we keep them alive for longer than 30 seconds, a day, or a week?

The answer is the same every year: Catch them on your digital architecture.

Many brands jumped in the SB buzz, and we analyzed dozens of them, the team and I chose four that represented the main takeaways I believe are the most relevant from our analysis. Avocados From Mexico , 百事 , 玛氏食品 's M&M, and Diageo 's Crown Royal whiskey.

Learning #1: The era of follower-based results is gone long ago. Please stop measuring success based on how many followers you got.

As simple as it gets, digital has evolved way beyond the followership base, and believe me, it is still a Top ranked question I get. Of our four chosen examples, we focused on Twitter, where most SB-related conversations happened. Avocados From Mexico got +968 new followers despite their massive reach of almost 2B. Why? Because they concentrate on many other KPIs that gave them better results, like conversations and engagement with 38,300 engagement actions. On the other hand, Crown Royal lost a few hundred (-124), most of them maybe because they needed to find the creative appealing, but who cares when losing -124 followers when you got over 36,300 engagements? Two brands with similar engagements, one gaining a thousand new followers, the other one losing a few hundred. Why? Simply because of the awareness each of them has.

If you measure the success of a campaign by the net follower growth, you might be losing a major opportunity of developing your brand throughout the entire digital architecure.

Learning #2: The Super Bowl doesn't start at kick-off for brands. As the teams, brands also need to warm up for the game.

Here is a significant example of how you can take the best advantage of an event or happening, in this case, the Superbowl, but this could be any major event you have, from a product launch to a special edition to any brand news. Despite the "reveal" of the main ad happening on a big screen (TV, cable, or streaming), the warmup can happen on any channel you want, with digital being the best option.

This approach helps build excitement increasing your chances of future engagement, and feeds the digital ecosystems to mature at a higher rate than usual.

Avocados From Mexico had a good warmup series, building and keeping momentum leading to Game Day. 百事 had a similar effect, with fewer ups and down but a very clear leading to the game strategy, very solid!

Crown Royal did decent work previously of the SB, and M&M's, despite their controversial campaign, seemed to save all their efforts for gameday.

Digital allows you to build momentum with your audience at almost the same cost. Marketers should always have in mind the word development. Brand positioning is a constant development story, you might be very well perceived, but you must keep that up. Every brand, some at a larger scale than others, use digital channels to build and keep their positioning, but as brands, digital is a constantly developing story.

Learning #3: Be proactive, not just active. Leverage the rest of the other brands. They are not your competitors but your allies.

How do you beat top-performing hashtags and conversations during the Superbowl? Here's how Avocados From Mexico did it, and they did it BIG.

Their hashtag #makeitbetter was as big as 苹果 's halftime show #applemusichalftime, bigger than #football, and believe it or not, much bigger than #superbowlsunday.

The moment you understand you are not the only player in the game, and you stop looking at competitors as so, but as allies; you will have the power to talk to them, their audience and even tagg them.

Here's how they did it in 3 simple steps:

1. They built their hashtag around their branding; one comes after the other (branding first, of course!)

2. Using their brand essence, they jumped into football and real-time game-related happenings like touchdowns, close calls, and winners.

3. They understood they were not the only player in the Bowl. They were at the same party as all the other players, so they did a fantastic job jumping into their conversations, leveraging on their hikes, and becoming great friends of all.

                Now the real challenge comes to life        

The Superbowl hype ended, and the genuine brand challenge has started. Naturally, it is impossible to keep the same momentum, but you can still take advantage of what you did, but you can't rely on consumers doing it for you; you must take action and be smart and strategic.

Make your short-term success and turn it into a mid-long-term one. This is why you go to the Superbowl.

My three pieces of advice on how to keep it going:

1. We had fun; we watched up, now make it personal. Move the conversation to more "private" channels like mailing or SMS.
2. Keep the conversations moving, answer every message, even if it's a late reply, and keep talking with your engagers. And by talking, I mean having a conversation, not selling them anything. Remember, as in life; you must learn when to stop.
3. Develop your entire digital ecosystem, not just a few leavers. Interconnect all of it as one, allowing consumers to navigate through all as a whole.

If you want to take a look at the slides the team prepared to come up with this analysis and conclusions, here you go. Feel free to use them. Special thanks to Jimmy Murphy and Drew Gagnon for putting this together in no time.