Brands’ Super Bowl measurement extends beyond record ratings

Super Bowl campaigns don’t end in a single 30- or 60- second spot anymore.

This Sunday’s Big Game drew about 125 million U.S. viewers, making it the second-most watched event in U.S. history, only behind last year’s Super Bowl, which had 127.7 million viewers.

But brands old and new are stretching their Super Bowl investments long after the game clock hits zero and the confetti falls onto the field.

NBCUniversal reports that nearly 40% of Super Bowl advertisers were new to this year’s game across all platforms compared to last year. Further, the company said the Super Bowl boosted brand recall by 33% and brand opinion by 31%.

Now, brands like Uber, Salesforce and more are riding that momentum into their post-Super Bowl campaigns.

Uber launched a “build-your-own” Super Bowl commercial adventure within its app, allowing users to create more than 1,000 versions of the ad. On top of that, Uber Eats offered users limited-time deals within the app, extending engagement beyond game day and unlocking interaction.

“By letting fans build their own Super Bowl commercial for the first time this year, we met people where they already are — in the app ordering game day snacks and at the center of the cultural conversation,” Liza Keller, head of integrated marketing campaigns at Uber, told The Current. “It turned a single game day moment into a memorable experience that keeps our brand top of mind long after the final whistle.”

Salesforce took a different approach. More than 70 million people have visited its website to try and win the $1 million prize featured in its Super Bowl ad with MrBeast.

Allie Wiggins, vice president of growth at Havas Edge, said that Super Bowl planning is a full-funnel engine built around a before and after strategy, with brands shifting immediately into demand-capture mode after a spot airs.

Advertisers can see spikes in site traffic, search volume and social engagement when an ad runs, according to Wiggins, especially if the ad includes a clear call to action. Still, while those metrics are immediate, getting the full picture takes longer.

“The full performance read on a Super Bowl campaign takes time, because while engagement, traffic and early sales signals appear quickly, those results often take 48 hours to 10 days to fully materialize,” Wiggins told The Current. “That’s why the smartest brands actually dial up their advertising after the game.”

InMarket is working with five to six brands across CPG and dining to provide real-time, unified measurement for their Super Bowl and Olympic campaigns.

Tying that all together across multiple channels comes down to the strength and purity of the data, InMarket CMO Natalie Bastian said. From there, brands can better assess how Super Bowl ad exposure influences purchases on a week-to-week basis.

“It’s not a matter of this [ad] was all influenced by the Super Bowl,” Bastian told The Current. “It’s not just this moment in time. It’s more of a jumping-off point and then an accelerator.”

Building that long-term resonance is the bigger opportunity, said Razorfish’s chief data and analytics officer, Sisi Zhang, with the best brands creating a feedback loop to see what resonates with audiences.

“Those signals then become clear indicators for where to invest more, where to optimize and where there’s an opportunity to create new content that builds on what’s already working,” Zhang told The Current.

For advertisers, that next tentpole moment is now the Winter Olympics, which opened with record ratings.

The Super Bowl was a major lead-in for Olympic coverage, which averaged 42 million viewers on Sunday, NBC’s largest Winter Olympics audience since 2014. Olympic viewership was also 73% higher this year than in 2022, following the Super Bowl, the last time NBC aired both the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

That cross-event strategy is a core tenet for NBCUniversal, which sold ad inventory for the Super Bowl and the Olympics together for the first time. About 40% of brands will advertise in both events, according to Mark Marshall, NBCU’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships.

Combining those major events adds roughly 30 million incremental viewers to advertisers’ reach.

“Some of these people spend $8 million on a piece of creative and run it once in the Super Bowl,” Marshall said on The Varsity podcast. “Our pitch to them was why don’t you use that entire two-week period to really extend the reach of what your message is going to be.”