Within 15 minutes of listening, Simon Kringel found himself humming a Super Bowl ad.

“Ooh, ooh, Temu…Ooh, ooh, Temu, all of my wishes came true.”

“It was pretty immediate,” Kringel, founder and director of unmute, a creative sound agency that has worked with clients like Lego and eBay, told Marketing Brew. “It has that annoying flavor to it. You don’t want to be stuck with it, but you are.”

After Sunday’s game, Kringel might not be the only one cooing (perhaps through clenched teeth) the saccharine refrain that aired around half a dozen times on Sunday night. It’s part of a spending wave that’ll see Temu (pronounced teh-moo, as the jingle reminds us) spend an estimated $3 billion on advertising this year, according to JP Morgan analysts cited by the Wall Street Journal.

The buy, which may have cost as much as $21 million for the three spots that aired during the game alone, quickly became something of a viral sensation, with viewers expressing surprise at the frequency of the ads, the brand’s tagline to “shop like a billionaire,” and, of course, the jingle itself. The platform earned 32% of all “branded and advertising conversations” during the game, or around 33,000 mentions on platforms like X, Facebook, and Reddit, according to Brandwatch, which analyzes social data.

Temu’s ad and its frequency, which Ad Age described as “something of a recurring nightmare,” could benefit from the “mere exposure effect,” in which people tend to develop a preference for things that are familiar, even if they didn’t prefer it at the outset, Kringel explained.

“In audio terms, the mere exposure effect is, if you hear something enough times, you will eventually like it,” he said. “Eventually it’ll stick in your ears, and you’ll start humming it.”

Continue reading here.—RB

Lithium is essential for batteries in electric cars, renewable energy storage, and even smartphones. That’s why demand for lithium is projected to grow 20x by 2040.

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Taylor Swift wasn’t an almost-guaranteed guest at this year’s Super Bowl until the Chiefs beat the Ravens last month. But that didn’t stop people from attributing her presence to the influx of beauty advertisers during the game.

Brands like e.l.f. Cosmetics, CeraVe, and Dove all aired national ads this year, while Hero Cosmetics, Cetaphil, and NYX Cosmetics went the regional route. In their spots, they took varying approaches: Cetaphil made Swifties the focal point of its creative, and e.l.f., Hero, and NYX showcased primarily women celebs like Gina Torres and Cardi B. CeraVe, meanwhile, worked with Michael Cera, which Global Brand Manager Melanie Vida told us was designed to reach a wider audience and make skin care seem genderless.

Regardless of the approach (or their target demos), beauty brands spent millions to be involved in the most-watched Super Bowl of all time. How much did it pay off?

For brands hoping to boost awareness, at least, the results in the days after the game seem promising:

• Compared to the Sunday prior to the Super Bowl, search intelligence platform Captify found that NYX and e.l.f. saw search volumes increase by 63% and 52%, respectively. It also found that competitors that didn’t advertise in the game saw softer search interest during the game across all advertiser categories, according to a press release.
• Kantar’s 2024 Super Bowl Creative Effectiveness Report found that Dove’s ad was 73% more effective than other ads at encouraging audience involvement by sparking a “provocative conversation with millions of people at the same time”—in this case, around girls’ body confidence.

“None of these [beauty] brands performed poorly,” Kerry Benson, creative solutions lead at Kantar, told us.

Read more here.—KH

It’s Amazon’s world, and we’re just living in it.

A few weeks ago, the e-commerce juggernaut debuted ads on Prime Video in the US, giving advertisers new ad inventory predicted to reach ~159 million global viewers each month. Already, plenty of brands are jumping at the chance to appear on the platform: Earlier this month, we spotted Samsung, Tinder, and New Balance advertising on Prime shows and movies.

How will the new addition to Amazon’s ad ecosystem stack up next to its other offerings, though? We talked to media buyers to understand if and how the new offering is impacting clients’ ad spend allocation, both across Amazon’s ad offerings and across other platforms.

Guinea pig? Clients at the growth marketing agency NoGood have already started shifting ad dollars from TikTok and YouTube to test out the new offering on Prime Video, CEO Mostafa ElBermawy told Marketing Brew. He attributed the appeal to try out the new platform to Amazon's “massive amount of intent data” on consumers, as well as the platform’s insulation from the effects of Google’s cookie phase-out.

Harry Inglis, head of activation at indie agency Mother, said the addition of Prime Video ads has been “well-received” by the agency’s clients so far. He added that marketers may find Prime Video ad CPMs, which are reportedly starting at $26, “competitive” compared to other streamers. Prime Video’s compatibility with third-party verification partners, as well as the potential addition of proprietary Amazon audiences, may also be attractive.

Continue reading here.—JS

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