The Super Bowl is the biggest stage in advertising, but for all the impact a great Super Bowl ad can achieve, it is just a single TV ad that will slip out of consumers’ minds if they’re not given a good reason to remember it. That’s why every Big Game investment needs a plan to drive consumer engagement all year round, both in the months leading up to the game and the months that follow the final whistle.
Rather than thinking of their Super Bowl ad as a one-off moment, the brands that win this year’s Big Game will be those that use their spot as the lynchpin of a months-long TV campaign that engages new consumers with each successive airing. Here’s a look at some of the leading brands that are already running this playbook and seeing results.
Pre-game: A great teaser campaign that drives engagement
M&M’s was one of last year’s most successful Super Bowl advertisers, in large part due to the combined efforts of an effective PR campaign and a set of highly engaging teaser ads the brand ran in the weeks leading up to kickoff.
In the month before the game, M&M’s announced it would be replacing its longtime “spokescandies” with the actress/comedian Maya Rudolph. In tandem, it released a set of humorous teaser ads in which Rudolph sought to put her stamp on the brand by emblazoning the candies with her face and renaming them to “Ma & Ya’s.”
These teaser ads drove consumer interest prior to the Super Bowl and increased anticipation for what the brand would do at the Super Bowl. And the data suggests that they played a big role in driving future candy sales.
At EDO, we measure the effectiveness of TV ads by monitoring consumer engagement for the brand in the minutes after the ad airs. Since online behaviors have a long-proven link to future business outcomes, these fast, granular metrics provide an investment-grade signal of how strong an ad’s return on investment will be.
In the case of M&M’s, one Rudolph-starring teaser was the brand’s best-performing creative of the preceding year, generating 88% more engagement per person than the average M&M’s ad during that time frame. And naturally, viewers were locked in during the Super Bowl to see the next chapter of the story—EDO engagement rankings found that M&M’s was the tenth most effective advertiser of the Super Bowl, generating more than five times the engagement of the average 2023 Big Game ad.
Post-game: Release condensed ads, extended cuts and creative variations
By the same token, you can generate additional impact after the Super Bowl by releasing new ads that continue your campaign.
The simplest way of doing this is by taking your Super Bowl ad footage and cutting it into a condensed version. For instance, T-Mobile made a 30-second version of its highly effective 60-second Super Bowl ad featuring the singing trio of actors Donald Faison, Zach Braff and John Travolta.
The brand aired the 30-second version 777 times in the four months following the Super Bowl and the ad generated 41% more engagement per person than the average T-Mobile spot of 2023. In doing so, T-Mobile extended the shelf life of its Super Bowl campaign into the early summer, while increasing the effectiveness of its advertising.
Other brands get more out of their Super Bowl spots by filming more content than they need for the ad, enabling them to release extended cuts or creative variations in the months after the game. This strategy can be especially effective for brands that want to optimize their ROI of a celebrity sponsor.
The master of this strategy last year was Booking.com, which released five variations of its Super Bowl ad starring Melissa McCarthy over the course of the year. The most effective was a special, 2-minute version of the brand’s 30-second Super Bowl ad that ran in March during the Academy Awards and an episode of American Idol. That ad generated more than five times as much per-person, per-second consumer engagement than the average Booking.com ad of 2023.
Year-round: Keep your eyes on the data
Given the cost of a modern Super Bowl ad, it simply doesn’t make sense to stop generating results from your most important creative work of the year once the game is over. And the examples above make clear that there’s plenty of additional ROI to be found by extending the lifespan of your campaign.
But how long should you continue running ads from your Super Bowl campaign on TV? Won’t consumers get tired of it?
The answer can be found by consistently tracking consumer response to your ads. Creative exhaustion varies greatly across brands and categories, and the only way to know when viewers are sick of your campaign is when they stop engaging with your brand after your ad airs.
By following this playbook before and after the Big Game, you’ll be well-positioned to make the most out of this year’s Super Bowl. Indeed, the advertisers that effectively extend their Super Bowl campaigns and closely monitor when to pull their post-game ads out of rotation won’t just win the Big Game—they’ll win the entire year that follows.
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Laura Grover is SVP and head of client solutions at EDO, the TV outcomes company. She has two decades of media and measurement experience, having held leadership roles at Initiative (IPG Mediabrands) and Nielsen.
