It All Comes Down To This: Marketing And Super Bowl 2021

When you work in brand marketing, there’s nothing quite like having a commercial in the Super Bowl.

It’s the highlight on everyone’s calendar. From the media team, to campaign management, creative strategy and leadership, it’s the goal at the end of a race that starts at least 6 months before the big day.

As a company, this was our fourth year with a commercial during the game and our second year hosting the country’s largest official game of Super Bowl Squares. While we may not have the same tenure as some other brands, this wasn’t our first rodeo by any means. 

However, at Rocket Mortgage^®, it’s never about copying what we’ve done before. Our culture is all about doing what’s next, what’s exciting and different and what’s going to show our current and potential clients exactly the sort of people we are: trendsetters. So, in a year when many brands were just looking to maintain the status quo, we decided to push boundaries and double our Super Bowl marketing efforts.  

During my time with the company, I’ve been lucky enough to work on three Super Bowl campaigns. First as an intern and then as a full-time team member. Each year has had its own unique rewards and challenges, but one thing has always stayed the same: my focus.

I’m a Social Content Campaign Manager. Essentially, I take plans for running a commercial campaign and translate it into the social space. This includes thinking about how many unique videos we’ll need, what social platforms we want to run on, how to effectively tap into the followings of our celebrity talent and ensuring everyone who is working to produce or push out social posts is on the same page. Social platforms have unique tones and specifications, requiring an ability to understand each one while keeping an eye on the big picture.  

The first year of the Rocket Mortgage^® Super Bowl Squares Sweepstakes was a huge success. This year, we needed to find ways to go beyond what we’d done before. Led this year by our campaign manager, Biancca Davenport, we had the team in place to take the sweepstakes to the next level. Being the largest official game of Super Bowl Squares in the country with commercials that feature NFL footage and talent like Barry Sanders and Gus Johnson, the sweepstakes was already a big deal. Each score change came with a chance to win $50,000, with two lucky winners receiving $500,000: One at the end of the first half of the game and one at the end of the game. It’s a great opportunity and the team and I wanted to try new approaches to spread the message in the social space.

One of the ways to do this is through influencers. With an entire career based on effectively attracting a very specific social audience, they know their followers and their platforms better than anyone. They also have strong creative skills or teams that can produce work that is entertaining as well as beneficial to our brand.

I’ve worked with influencers before, but this year we decided to take it to the next level. We partnered with over 25 internet personalities, ranging from the CEO of 100 Thieves, Matt Haag, to Angela Yee from The Breakfast Club, to former quarterback Mark Sanchez. As we decided to take this campaign into Spanish-speaking marketing, we also made connections with news anchors from ESPN Deportes and Univision Deportes. All were individuals who could explain the sweepstakes in a way that is familiar to their fan base and endemic to the platform. Each one made a unique video for their social channels that was scheduled and vetted by me and designed to encourage their fans to enter, helping us to spread the word.

Four of our influencers also came from a social platform we’ve never utilized before: TikTok. In 2020 and 2021, we have seen TikTok spread from a smaller Generation Z-focused app to a huge powerhouse of social sharing. We knew we wanted to get in there early, so we worked directly with four major influencers each with over a million followers. They developed creative on our behalf, helping to drive entries and bring us into a brand-new space with a bang.

With the help of these influencers and a robust social remarketing plan, we were able to really increase our social reach for the second year of this amazing sweepstakes.

As our Chief Marketing Officer, Casey Hurbis, likes to say, “The Super Bowl is the biggest stage in the country.” It’s the one night where people pay as much attention to the ads as they do to the main programming. Your Super Bowl commercial is the way you make your mark for the entire year and all eyes are on you.

Since this was the year of going above and beyond, we knew we really wanted to expand the scope of what we covered during the Super Bowl. We decided to develop two unique commercials: One that would showcase our Rocket Mortgage^® product and the other highlighting our brand-new broker directory, Rocket Pro^SM TPO.

After months of vetting and reviews led by our campaign manager, Meghan England, we found the perfect commercial concept by the creative agency Highdive. It centers around comedian Tracy Morgan, as he showcases two families being “certain” about their mortgage with Rocket Mortgage^® and why it’s so much better than just being “pretty sure.”

Two commercials need a lot of big-name talent, so we also recruited Dave Bautista, Liza Koshy, Joey Bosa and Retta in addition to Tracy Morgan. Each one came with their own social following that we were able to tap into before and during the day to generate excitement around our spots. This involved rigorous planning to ensure we were properly developing creative in their voice and tone and enveloping their personality into the work we made for ourselves. In the end, I worked to implement and schedule 11 social teasers for our talent, spacing them out during the week before the Super Bowl to get their fan bases excited.

These celebrities also helped to get our teasers out on social media, with each one sharing the commercials on Twitter and Instagram. We also brought this talent into other spaces where we knew they would capture the interests of current and potential clients. This included a large number of GIFs for websites like Giphy.com, social headers, Instagram stories and a behind-the-scenes look for longer-form placements like YouTube.

While there were only two spots airing on TV during the Super Bowl, there was way more happening behind the scenes for social media. Between two campaigns, two commercials, six celebrities, prize winners to announce in real time and dozens of supporting assets, planning is the name of the game.

The reality of a COVID-19 world meant that unlike our previous Super Bowl campaigns, we couldn’t all be together. To manage the social feeds, celebrity talent posts, influencer posts and the development of winner creative for the Rocket Mortgage^® Super Bowl Squares Sweepstakes in real time, a huge number of people were needed. With some being allowed into a socially distant office and many working from home, the development of a robust plan of attack fell to me. 

Although you can never plan for every eventuality, I created a 40-page deck that showcased the roles and responsibilities for over 45 people across six teams. This included a step-by-step description of anything that might occur during the night and the 14 online chats we used to communicate with one another.

Armed with this guide, the unique plans for each campaign and a very talented team behind me, we entered into the day of Super Bowl, a little nervous and very excited.

It’s amazing how an event that takes months of planning, organizing, filming, editing, late night meetings, hurried phone calls, celebrity interviews, building schedules and thousands of emails to compose can go by so quickly. One minute you’re waiting with bated breath for the game to start and the next thing you know, you’re finally shutting your computer off at 12:45 a.m., wondering where the night went.

But honestly, that’s what working the Super Bowl is like in a nutshell. A whirlwind of controlled chaos that makes you realize in one crystal clear moment why it is that you do what you do. How getting to experience a once-in-a-lifetime event is all about preparing for what you can prepare for and facing the unexpected with enthusiasm and a team you trust completely.

We spent the night answering hundreds of social comments in real time, giving away $1.6 million in prizes and watching two of our commercials air during the Super Bowl. I went to sleep tired, but the best kind of tired. The kind of tired where you go to bed knowing you’ve helped accomplish something amazing.

And getting to wake up Monday morning to see our spots ranked #1 and #2 on the USA Today Ad Meter was unlike any other feeling in the world. The congratulations went all around, with my team leader, Mike Martin, Casey Hurbis and our Executive Creative Director, Michael Corbeille, sharing their pride and thanks with all of us.

As I look at what we’ve accomplished, there’s one thought I just can’t keep out of my head. It’s the thought that makes working at Quicken Loans^® so exciting and drives all of us do more than we’ve done before.

Now I ask, “What’s next?”