Can Aussie brands leverage the Super Bowl hype?

At $US8m for a 30-second advertising slot, the Super Bowl has become a major event for fans and brands. With the celebrity-studded ads regularly attracting global headlines, why don’t more local brands leverage the moment?

Uber Eats’ Super Bowl ad featuring Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey

Australian brands should lean in to the Super Bowl and leverage the growing interest and fan base, which is set to accelerate next year when the NFL brings the game to Melbourne.

The American football league last week announced its plans to host a game at the MCG in 2026 as part of a multi-year deal to grow the league’s fans internationally.

The NFL claims to have a growing base of 6.6 million fans in Australia, which supports Seven and 7Plus’s claim that 2.7 million Australians watched the Super Bowl broadcast last year – a 43 per cent increase on the previous year. This Australian Super Bowl audience figure is particularly significant when you consider the time zone difference puts the event at 10am on a Monday morning.

While the local viewing numbers pale in comparison to the US, where more than 100 million people tuned in last year, it showcases a significant opportunity for local brands wanting to engage with fans. Plus, it’s a significant bargain compared with the eye-watering price of a 30-second spot on US TV, which this year reached a record high of $US8m ($12.6m) or $266,000 per second.

Super Bowl ads are big business for brands. Viewed as part of the event’s overall entertainment, 78 per cent of viewers claim to watch the ads, while 11 per cent claim to watch for the ads and not the sport, according to Ipsos research.

Accenture ANZ managing director of media strategy Chris Colter said social media and digital streaming had bolstered the popularity of the celebrity-studded adverts by connecting and engaging with audiences globally.

“Good Super Bowl ads have always unlocked global reach, usually in the form of light news segments that highlight the best ads of the year,” Mr Colter said. “However, more and more marketers are planning for global campaigns around this moment as international fandom exponentially increases.”

“What was once a niche sporting moment in the Australian sporting calendar (is now) a major cultural moment local marketers should heavily consider adding to their strategies.”

Mr Colter said the huge interest in the event provided marketers with an opportunity to engage locally.

“I have been surprised at the lack of global brands running their Super Bowl marketing on local broadcasts over here,” he said. “It’s wild, as the production costs of these ads can be astronomical, and therefore brands should be looking to maximise their global impact and association with this massive cultural moment by running them in all major local markets as well.”

L’Oreal skincare brand CeraVe leveraged the global opportunity last year, when the local marketing team ran activity as part of the brand’s Super Bowl campaign. The campaign, which featured actor Michael Cera, consisted of pre-event activity, including paparazzi photos of Cera walking the streets with bags of the product, while influencers helped spread his “claim” that he had invented the brand.

CeraVe’s marketing team and brand dermatologists launched content denying the claims, all of which was amplified by influencers. The campaign culminated in a Super Bowl ad revealing the stunt, which was lauded by audiences and drove a 25 per cent increase in sales globally.

Locally, the activity boosted brand awareness and trial in Australia, said L’Oreal Dermatologic Beauty Australian and New Zealand managing director Penelope Thornett.

CeraVe’s Super Bowl campaign from 2023 drove the strongest brand awareness of any campaign.

“The whole thing was super creative, super fun, and it wasn’t just about the Super Bowl. The campaign was done in stages so the Super Bowl became the stage of amplification for the campaign,” she said.

“This campaign was the strongest result of any awareness campaign we’d ever seen. It achieved great results, had strong recall and, based on what we saw through the metrics, not only built awareness for us, but drove an uptick in recruitment and people trialling and buying the brand.

“There’s not a lot of geographic boundaries around social media, so Australians are already consuming a lot of content that’s coming to us from other countries. It would have been a lost opportunity not to seize this great creative idea and then bring it to life in a really locally relevant way, using our local dermatologist partners and local collaborators.”

Ms Thornett believes the Super Bowl is an opportunity that more local brands and marketers should consider.

“I’m glad we took advantage of it, but each brand would need to make their own choice,” she said.

Tourism Australia’s chief marketing officer Susan Coghill saw the viral impact of Super Bowl advertising in 2018, when the tourism organisation launched the iconic Dundee campaign. The campaign consisted of teasers for a purportedly new Crocodile Dundee film in the lead-up to the Super Bowl.

The activity went viral globally, but Ms Coghill believes one of the key elements of that campaign went over the heads of audiences in other markets.

“There is a cultural truth around Super Bowl media buys that there’s often a lot of new film release advertising, so creating a trailer that would air within the ad breaks at the Super Bowl was quite believable,” she said.

“At the time, buddy films and Hollywood remakes were very much the thing, so it was this multi-layered idea. All of these things worked together to make a ‘is it real, or not’ moment.”

Ms Coghill was uncertain that brands could tap into the Super Bowl and make it work locally. “At heart, the Super Bowl is a distinctly American moment,” she said.

However, Clemenger BBDO chief strategy and experience officer Simon Wassef disagreed. “When a brand advertises in the Super Bowl, it inserts itself into a global conversation,” Mr Wassef said.

“Let’s face it, America is good at amplifying stuff to the world. At the Super Bowl, brands have a way to create a global force multiplier, a shortcut to fame and even infamy. Super Bowl ads aren’t just about American consumers. They create a global ripple effect, amplifying awareness, status, and credibility in markets far beyond the US. In a way, the Super Bowl is less of an ad spend and more of an investment in global brand equity.”

Mr Colter agreed. As video-first platforms like TikTok become our primary source of content consumption, (consumers are) more likely to organically stumble across these ads,” he said.

Uber Eats 2023 Super Bowl ad, which featured David and Victoria Beckham, was a viral hit that drove engagement across a number of international markets.

As a regular Super Bowl advertiser, Uber Eats understands the halo effect its marketing has internationally. This year’s spot, which stars Matthew McConaughey, Martha Stewart and Charli XCX, amassed a huge online audience, well before the game.

“Each year our goal is to go bigger and be better than in years past,” said Uber head of marketing for the US and Canada, Georgie Jeffreys.

GroupM Sport & Entertainment managing partner Brodie Watson predicts more local brands will want to integrate into the Super Bowl experience next year, following the NFL game in Australia.

“That game will be massive and it’ll only increase the hype around the Super Bowl,” he said. We’ll see Super Bowl audiences increase year-on-year once we have that touch point of an NFL event in Australia and we’ll see that natural gravitation towards the Super Bowl increasing.”