TV

Super Bowl, so what?

Congrats! You’ve just spent $6.5 million of your marketing budget on a 30-second commercial that ran while most of the country was filling up on bean dip and wings. Was it worth it?

That’s a question marketers and media buyers ask themselves every year after the Super Bowl. Sure, tens of millions of people watch the game each year, which could be enough justification for marketers to deem the investment a worthy one. Still, brands have all kinds of mechanisms in place to try and make sure they get the most bang for their $$.

A bit of a dirty secret: Many advertisers are banking on months and months of testing and surveys that predict how successful a Super Bowl campaign will ultimately be.

This process can start before the media buy is even purchased. Brand health surveys are sometimes administered to measure a company’s equity among a certain audience. For instance, how does Burger King match up to Wendy’s? Chipotle? Where are people most likely to spend their dollars? 

• Then, subsequent surveys and testing can be done at the briefing stage (would this type of ad sell you a cheeseburger?), the conceptual stage (literal storyboards and rough cuts of an advertisement), and, finally, as the creative reaches postproduction.
• Of course, many campaigns, not just Super Bowl ones, are tested. But the Super Bowl is the biggest stage with the highest stakes, so brands really go all in.

“Every ad that you see on the Super Bowl, especially the big brands, has been tested to death by the time it airs,” said Kerry Benson, content analytics practice lead for Kantar, a company that runs audience insight surveys and tests for advertisers. 

But testing can only get you so far. It’s artificial and delivered without the context of the mass spectacle that is the game (or the previously mentioned bean dip).

“It’s not how people actually watch the Super Bowl,” said Amy Ferguson, executive creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day NY, who worked on Mountain Dew’s two most recent Super Bowl spots and another for E-Trade. “It’s imperfect, but I also understand the stakes are so high with that amount of money,” she told us, explaining that brands have to have something to point to ahead of the game that says, “This is why we’re going to do this, this is why it made sense.”

Click here to read about different ways Super Bowl advertisers try to gauge the success of their commercials.—RB

TECHNOLOGY

An Apple (update) a day keeps the marketers away

A slew of privacy updates that Apple announced in June at its annual developer conference are officially kicking in, thanks to iOS 15, which rolls out today.

Refresher: In short, these new features will make it harder for marketers to glean info from Apple users. For instance, users will now be able to prevent marketers from knowing if they opened an email in the Mail app. And a new privacy service built into iCloud masks traffic in Safari, making users less traceable.

• Of course, this is far from Apple’s first privacy rodeo. You’re probably aware of its “App Tracking Transparency” feature that rolled out earlier this year, which is why apps keep asking you if they can track you across the internet (spoiler alert: most people say no).

While Apple gives its customers more privacy options, industry insiders believe the company is using the opp to build out its own advertising offering. As Ad Age wrote last week, “advertisers believe the more Apple shuts off data to outsiders, the more it will be compelled to enter the advertising void.” In May, Apple rolled out a new way for brands to reach users in its App Store by adding a new ad slot to its Search tab. 

Zoom out: Even as it grows, Apple’s ad business is small potatoes compared with other tech giants. Its App Store advertising will bring in roughly $2 billion during this fiscal year, per estimates from Cowen & Co. cited by the Wall Street Journal. For comparison, Google earned $147 billion in online ad revenue last year.—MS

SPONSORED BY ATTEST

New Regions Are on the Horizon

We aren’t pilots or anything, but we’re pretty sure you don’t need to know how to fly an airplane to take your brand to new regions and reach new audiences. 

You just need a little consumer-research boost from Attest. 

They were the wind beneath the wings (metaphorically speaking) of D2C veg box brand Oddbox. As the demand for food delivery took off during the pandemic, Oddbox used Attest to help guide their campaign and unlock new growth by launching in three new regions. 

With the power of Attest consumer data, Oddbox was able to understand their localized brand awareness and consumer preference before taking off into uncharted territory. They were able to tailor their campaign strategy before reaching new heights. 

Check out the results: 

• £200k saved on campaign costs 
• -34% CPA of influencer activity
• +101k Instagram followers

Learn more about how you can use Attest to master expanding into new regions today.

CAMPAIGNS

Thinx is thinxing about OOH

Period underwear brand Thinx debuted its first digital billboard last week, leaning on its existing social media strategy for support. 

• The Brooklyn billboard invited viewers to pull out their phones and share their period worries with Thinx on social media.
• From Sunday, 9/12, to Saturday, 9/18, a giant pair of Thinx on the billboard “absorbed” said worries. 
• Examples included: “Planning outfits around my period,” “Commuting while cramping,” “Bleeding out on someone else’s chair,” and more, per info about the campaign that Thinx shared with Marketing Brew.  

OOH influencer marketing: To spread the campaign’s message, the company’s chief growth officer, Crystal Zerrenner, told Marketing Brew it’s leveraging a mix of new influencers—such as Kate Glavan—as well as existing “Thinx Leaders,” aka brand ambassadors, like Nadia Chanté and Pamela Zapata. “We are working with creators to roll out a high volume of user-generated content to encourage people to share their period worries and organically create their own #Thinx #absorbsworries content,” Zerrenner told us. 

Thinx’s in-house creative team “intentionally chose a multichannel approach spanning OOH, social, and digital media,” in order to maximize the billboard’s impact. Zerrenner noted that Thinx recently learned its user-generated creative results in a 34% greater return on ad spend (ROAS) than static/GIF ads.

+1: While this is Thinx’s first digital billboard, it’s dipped its toes in OOH before. Remember its controversial subway ads?—PB

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Netflix won more Emmys than any other streaming platform (or network, for that matter), raking in 44 little gold statues. 
• Bloomberg reported that some Wall Street influencers make more money than bankers. 
• The FTC released findings of 616 unreported mergers at major tech companies like Facebook and Google’s owner, Alphabet. 
• HBO Max is temporarily offering a 50% discount on subscriptions to counteract subscriber losses as the service leaves Amazon. 
• Disney unveiled its Creators Lab, complete with 20 “emerging” social influencers.
• The WSJ’s “Facebook Files” series continued last week, exploring topics such as the social network’s effect on vaccination rates and more.  
• Glassdoor acquired adworld gossip app Fishbowl.

SPONSORED BY SAILTHRU

Send with the best of ’em. Sailthru is the media and campaign management partner of choice for Condé Nast, Business Insider, NewsUK, and yours truly—Morning Brew. Sailthru’s founders are former media and publishing CTOs, so they understand your needs. Read Sailthru’s Beyond Advertising guide on publishing in a cookieless world here. 

FRENCH PRESS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

’Lytics: In case you were too afraid to ask after all this time, here’s a beginner’s guide to Google Analytics. 

YouTube: Reading this deep dive into how YouTube recommends videos could make your brand’s content strategy on the platform that much stronger. 

Instagram: Find out how to add a cover photo to Instagram Reels just like you can for Instagram Story Highlights. 

Mark your calendars for Commerce+: On October 13, the most talked about brands will be dishing deets on how to influence the next generation, sell globally, and grow boldly at Shopify’s Commerce+ livestream event. Register for free here.*

Your DMs are flooded: Your schedule doesn’t have to be. ManyChat’s Instagram Automation replaces tedious manual effort in answering FAQs, boosting engagement, and more. Better yet, they won’t make your brand sound like a cyborg. Never miss another DM again.*

AD ANTIQUES

Vintage Ad Browser

The definitive best football ad of all time is from Milky Way in 1953—we pray that every 2022 Super Bowl commercial is just this ad on loop. 

ICYMI

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Limited by other platforms, weed marketers are flocking to podcast advertising
• Roku survey says streaming ads will play a big role in holiday shopping
• Robinhood’s fall marketing blitz will zero in on college students