Hello readers!
One of the most valuable stories for marketers that we produce on Super Bowl Sunday is when we're able to spend the Big Game in a brand's war room. It gives us a glimpse into the controlled chaos a brand wades through to deliver a winning performance across social media. It's invaluable information that we can then pass along to you, the reader, for the day in your career when you find yourself in a war room.
Two years ago, Tide gave us access to its night of activities for the launch of its iconic "It's a Tide Ad" campaign. This year, Tide invited us back to tell the story of its "Laundry Later" campaign, which creativity editor David Griner ranked as the seventh best campaign of the Super Bowl.
Paul Hieber, our CPG reporter who wrote the story, revealed how Tide sets up its social listening and some of Tide's on the spot decision making—like what to do when you tag the wrong actress on Twitter in your pinned tweet for the evening. The team monitored a number of different hashtags—positive and negative (the team still keeps an on #TidePodChallenge)—to track feedback. And for Tide Sunday night, the results were overwhelmingly positive: 99% of mentions were favorable.
In other news, President Donald Trump said he planned to run 60 seconds of reelection ads during the Super Bowl. In the end, he only ran a single 30-second ad. After the game, we found out that when Trump split his 60-second ad-buy into two ads, Fox could no longer accommodate both spot 30-second spots. Publishing editor Sara Jerde goes into detail about why the two spots raised problems for Fox.
PepsiCo, one of the night's biggest spenders, dropped nearly $40 million on just ads. When you factor in the sponsorships of the halftime show, the cost of the talent in the ads and production, PepsiCo's investment in the Super Bowl comes in far, far higher than $40 million. Agency reporter Erik Oster did a deep dive into why Pepsi commits so deeply to the Big Game.
Speaking of big spenders, Super Bowl 54 likely generated around $400 million in ad revenue for Fox with Pepsi and AB InBev leading the way around $40 million each. See the rest of the top spenders here.
We'll have more Super Bowl updates tomorrow and Wednesday, so stay tuned. For now, we've included more of our top stories below.
