The Super Bowl is one of the biggest days for advertisers and marketers each year, especially for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry. Advertisers pay crazy amounts of money every year for a 30-second TV spot (a record $5.25 million this year) that will be broadcast to the millions and millions of consumers watching the big game on TV. Meanwhile, marketers build CPG marketing campaigns and sponsorships around the game too.
If you watch the game on TV, you will see ads, hear announcers talk about segments of the broadcast, replays, and even areas of the field that are sponsored by different brands, most of which are consumer brands. Meaning, the sponsorships were coordinated as a full-blitz CPG marketing campaign. But what’s the experience for the tens of thousands of people that are actually at the Super Bowl? That question is one I have never been able to answer, until now.
Any successful CPG marketing campaign is going to be targeted toward consumers that are viewers of the game — those that are among the millions that are watching the game from the comfort of home. However, any marketer will tell you that to create a successful marketing campaign, you must be able to reach every potential target consumer, including those at the actual game. So what do all of these CPG marketing campaigns look like from inside the stadium?
I was lucky enough to attend this year’s Super Bowl to watch my beloved New England Patriots win their sixth Super Bowl championship against the Los Angeles Rams. Even though I was at the game purely as a die-hard Patriots fan, I’m a marketer, and that means I can never entirely turn off my marketing sensory system. I have wondered for many years whether any of these CPG marketing campaigns bleed into the stadium, and now I can answer that question, and also talk about a marketing lesson that I learned from attending the big game — something that can genuinely be described as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
For the majority of the day, my thought was “wow, I can’t believe how little marketing effort is being put into the attendees of the game.” For the most part, that was the case overall, as there was minimal branding or targeted campaigns by any brand. However, during the game, a few big brands used a tried-and-tested CPG marketing method that stood out.
CPG Marketing Winners
Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer brand that wants to run a successful CPG marketing campaign and wants it to impact people who are attending a game. What would you do? Snickers and Pepsi were indeed the only two CPG brands that had an answer— repetition.
Repetition is a tactic that marketers have been using for many years. Repeating your messaging multiple times helps consumers remember and also believe in your messaging. Typically, the most successful repetition marketing campaigns adhere to the following principles:
- Use less, but more targeted and specific, messages. In other words, focusing on fewer messages will increase your consumer’s ability to remember the messages you do share.
- Repeat the messaging at a steady and consistent flow. If you’re not consistently putting the messaging out, then you’re not repeating it correctly. Typically, the ideal number of times that the same message is repeated to the same consumer is between three and five times.
- Test the campaigns. Like everything else in Marketing, testing your campaign and measuring the effectiveness of your campaign, can help you make the most of your marketing dollars.
So what does repetition marketing have to do with the CPG marketing campaigns that I was talking about before? While I didn’t get the chance to watch all of the commercials, I did see branding, logos and hear announcements that “this timeout is brought to you by …” and more often than not, it was either Snickers or Pepsi. This was especially true for the halftime show. As a consumer at the game, I can tell you that these announcements subtly left a mark in my mind, especially since I’m so accustomed to being bombarded by CPG marketing and ad campaigns while watching the Super Bowl. I must have heard those announcements at least three or four times per brand during the game, which falls directly in-line with repetition marketing best practices. In other words, CPG marketers can learn a lot from the great work by Snickers and Pepsi, especially concerning how to market your CPG product to consumers at a live event.
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