How to Make the Super Bowl Work For Your Brand

As the excitement around the historic Super Bowl 50 hits fever pitch, many marketers are fine-tuning their strategies for leveraging the Big Game to their marketing advantage.

However, for brands to truly capitalise on the NFL, they need to understand what is most important about the NFL… its fans.

The Super Bowl is equally as important for the fans as it is for your brand. It is situated in hard-core football territory – having become a cultural and social phenomenon firmly embedded in the hearts and minds of over 200 million sports fans – and brands need to consider the role it plays in people’s lives and how they engage with the sport.

Football is social (think tailgate parties) and lends itself to armchair quarterbacks. The long breaks allow people to comment and offer their opinion on what is unfolding. And you can’t watch football without snacks – food and drinks are an integral part of the American football game.

Heinz is a great example of a brand that recognises the importance of food at the Super Bowl – their recently unveiled 2016 ad (below) is already being praised as one of this year’s advertising winners.

These truths create an interesting back drop for brands to get involved and leverage the event. It is the perfect opportunity, especially for food, drink and lifestyle brands to make the event work in their favour – but they will need to follow a few golden rules to maximise their marketing potential:

Take advantage of second screen ‘downtime’

Around 76 percent of adults use a second screen whilst watching sports.  Engaging with fans is as important as what you say. For a game lasting nearly three hours, only about 60 minutes of this is used for playing football. Find out where your fans are during the remaining 120 minutes – most likely they’ll be chatting about the game on social channels, checking their Twitter feeds or searching for game -elated information and statistics. Engage them in relevant content and conversation around the game to enhance their experience, whether that is through Facebook video platforms, Snapchat, Instagram or Google real-time ads.

Appeal to what your fans actually care about

If your brand has nothing relevant to offer the Super Bowl fan, there is little chance you will be able to create a meaningful connection. Link to the rituals they care about – food, drink, chants and songs – and integrate fans into the experience. Give them the ability to enhance their watching experience, contribute to discussions and feel part of the Game community thus creating a positive affinity with your brand. Then capitalise on your brand awareness and make sure you incorporate a long-term relevance beyond the NFL.

Most importantly, be innovative – utilise unofficial channels of brand affiliation and responsive marketing to create engagement. Clever marketers should already be eyeing up the possibility of matching the success of popular brand, Oreo, whose ‘You can still dunk in the dark’ social media response to an unexpected power outage was retweeted over 10,000 times within the first hour.

The most essential aspect for brands to remember in Super Bowl season is to show fans that you are a fan too and understand the important role football plays in their everyday social environment, like the NFL’s own 2016 ad which celebrates the babies born nine months later in winning cities featuring the Super Bowl babies’ choir!