Marketing Briefing: Why brands like Verizon, Tushy, Anytime Fitness ran with more interactive Super Bowl efforts this year
Sweepstakes to garner attention without having to shell out the cost of a 30-second spot — this year the price tag was a cool $7 million — isn’t a new strategy but it is one that brands like Anytime Fitness, Tushy and Verizon, among others, employed this year.
By making the Super Bowl ad more interactive, whether through the sweepstakes approach or by a guessing game of sorts (as, for example, Downy did by making consumers guess which celebrity would star in its Big Game spot) marketers wanted to find ways to make sure consumers wouldn’t just passively watch, or worse, ignore their spots this year. The build up to the game for the brands is then less about the traditional teaser, full spot, longer spot online and more about getting consumers to want to follow along, either by creating a mystery to solve or offering some incentive for them to do so.