Even after the final whistle blew on the Seattle Seahawks’ 29-13 win over the New England Patriots, Rocket’s Super Bowl was far from over.
Sure, the brand had a Super Bowl ad featuring Lady Gaga singing a Mr. Rogers classic, but that was just the beginning. At 8 p.m. ET, immediately after Rocket and Redfin’s Super Bowl spot aired, the brands released the first of six app-exclusive clues that would roll out over the next 48 hours for users to play a contest in order to win a million-dollar home.
This last part of Rocket’s Super Bowl strategy is perhaps its most important because it’s not just focused on entertaining audiences or attracting their attention; it’s about recruiting their participation.
Rocket CMO Jonathan Mildenhall told me last week that Super Bowl strategies must now have pre-game, in-game, and post-game stages, and participation was key.
“We’re going to ensure that we’ve got eyeballs on the spot looking for the home, but it’s only after it airs that the first of six clues are given, and the remaining six clues are given over a 48-hour period to ensure that Rocket and Redfin are in the postgame conversation,” Mildenhall said. “So the new strategy that I would implore all marketers to be thinking about is you’ve got three stages of Super Bowl investment, and one of those stages has to be dominated by your audience participation.”
The Super Bowl is simultaneously a singular moment for advertisers, and a microcosm of the broader challenges facing brands every single day. Sure, it’s the biggest, most high profile collective cultural moment we have left, but it retains the same difficulty of standing out, making a mark, and really getting our attention as any other moment. As a result, more brands are working to get audiences involved in some way, shape or form, in order to break through all the noise.
Here’s a look at how four brands tackled participation in each stage of the Super Bowl.
Pre-game prep
Comcast Xfinity’s Jurassic Park-themed spot is one of the most Super Bowl-y things a brand could do. Bringing back a beloved franchise classic—including de-aged versions of the original cast—and putting its own quirky twist on it to tie in its product is not exactly rocket science. It’s obvious people will love it. But how do you make sure they really love it and remember it?
Comcast’s chief growth officer for connectivity and platforms Jon Geiselman says that the Super Bowl used to be a single, high-stakes moment, now it’s a runway. “Audiences don’t just show up on game day anymore,” says Geiselman. “For marketers, that’s changed the job. The ad isn’t the finish line; it’s the centerpiece of a much longer story.”
Created with agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), Comcast Xfinity’s longer story included an in-game NBA take-over at Philly’s Xfinity Arena during the Sixers-Bucks game on January 26. Then, in San Francisco in the week leading up to the game there were Jurassic Park Lyft Rides, where the brand turned some Lyft vehicles into the iconic Jurassic Park tour cars, had dinosaur projections light up the city’s historic Hobart Building, a motion-sensored T. Rex billboard on Market Street, and taking “Baby Tango” raptor character outside of Universal Orlando to roam the city and engage with fans.
GS&P creative director Jen Hart says the pre-game strategy was itself split into stages. “The first thing out of the gate was taking down an NBA arena during primetime, with Reggie Miller and Noah Eagle offering commentary on live TV about what was unfolding,” says Hart. “The next day on social, we invited the world to bring the park back online with an alluring grand prize: a trip back to Jurassic Park’s set in Hawaii. We then opened the doors to the park—including a ‘lost commercial’ running on television for a fully functional Jurassic Park, as well as the original cast teasing our Super Bowl spot on social.”
In-game action
Getting fans involved during the game is a unique challenge given there’s, you know, an actual football game people are watching. But a good marketer’s job is to find the space, no matter how small, to squeeze in a compelling reason for us to pay attention.
Three brands who worked in different ways to do that this year were Coinbase, OpenAI, and Kraft.
OpenAI released three regional ads before the game, but saved its direct pitch to coders for the big game itself. CMO Kate Rouch says that not only was their ad aiming to be a rallying cry for builders to try its newest version of Codex, but it was littered with easter eggs—small signs within the ad—for coders to find and use to get prizes and other goodies.
“Actions speak louder than words, so we’re offering Codex for free, and we have this point of view about building and making things, that anyone can do this,” says Rouch. “So this Easter egg, is actually tied to a behavior in Codex, and you have to participate in the product to unlock the merch. It’s just a small, simple thing, but we wanted to signal that this is about making things, and kind of lift up people who are going to do something.”
Crypto platform Coinbase had a lot to live up to. Under former CMO Rouch, the brand made a splash at the 2022 Super Bowl with a bouncing QR code, so current CMO Cat Ferdon knew they needed to continue that legacy of uniquely getting people’s attention. Her solution: why not get people singing karaoke?
The Coinbase ad brilliantly mimicked old school karaoke machine screen to get viewers to sing-along with its adapted version of the Backstreet Boys’ 1997 hit “Everybody.”
Coinbase vice-president of creative Joe Staples says that what makes the Super Bowl unique is that there are 120 million people actively watching ads. “So you can choose to do the thing you normally do with more famous people, or you can take it as a time to talk to a nation,” says Staples. “Or you can just acknowledge that everyone’s had six beers and loads of wings, and are in the room with 15 friends watching a commercial.”
The participation goal here was to get people laughing and singing with each other. Ferdon says that it’s about carving out a moment, and making an event out of that moment. “Ideally, we’re giving the audience something to participate in so that people in the room, wherever they’re watching, can feel like they’re a part of that event with us,” she says. “And that in itself is actually the spectacle.”
Kraft Heinz didn’t have an official big game spot for Mac & Cheese, but it did invest in a celebrity to get people participating during the game. The brand had comedian John Mulaney, who voices its ongoing Best Thing Ever campaign, to respond to every Super Bowl ad in real-time—including Coinbase’s karaoke—with custom video ads during the big game on social.
Kraft Heinz CMO Todd Kaplan says the point is to try and engage the audience where they are, specifically, on the second screen during the game. “Listen, not all 50 plus ads are going to be home runs,” he says. “It’s about finding the moments to come in a humorous way with a point of view for our brand and just drive a conversation, which is really what our job is as marketers.”
Post-game work
This is perhaps the toughest Super Bowl nut to crack. It’s also the most recent part of the game that brands have been trying to tap into.
Rocket essentially decided to combine all the trappings of more traditional ad, pack it with an emotional punch, and then do its own version of “DoorDash All The Ads.” In 2024, DoorDash pulled off a Super Bowl hat-trick in that it had a creative idea that got attention and awareness right away—delivering a lucky winner everything advertised during the game—with the short-term pay off of actual DoorDash app downloads. It got more than 8 million contest submissions and 11 billion impressions.
With a clue to winning a million dollar home embedded in its Super Bowl ad, Mildenhall says that the contest will drive Redfin app downloads—you need the app to enter the contest—and ideally even provide a post-game boost to its commercial.
“I’m hoping that our ad becomes the most-viewed Super Bowl ad this year,” he says. “Because we’re driving people back to it six times so that they can identify which of the homes you’ve seen in the ad is actually available on Redfin tp win.”
