Nacho Average Super Bowl Ads With a CDP

It’s that time of the year that the entire Marketing world has been waiting for, when the biggest names in advertising show us their most creative and compelling messaging and content that they have – The Super Bowl!

In its 50 years+ of existence, the Super Bowl has become an American phenomenon.  In this premiere media event, the NFL football final may very well attract over 100M viewers. And so many Americans nationwide watch the Super Bowl on this exciting Sunday, that it’s caused a new holiday to surface the day after — Super Sick Monday — just to recover from the festivities! But while the games themselves have mostly all been competitive and entertaining, there is much more to this media extravaganza:  The Super Bowl halftime show, for example, has become one of the most anticipated performances in the world.  

In addition, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone amongst the throngs of fans tuning in from all corners of the earth who aren’t looking forward to watching what will become a popular water-cooler topic for the subsequent few weeks:  

The Super Bowl Ads.

With upfront inventory going for millions of dollars to some of the most beloved brands in the world, the expectations for Super Bowl Ads are the gold standard for creativity, aesthetic, and effect.  In fact, around 27% of viewers claim that the commercials are their favorite part!  So it makes sense that this is when the best commercials for the year will air, and competition for those ad upfronts is heavy.  There are many instances where a brand has broken through to outstanding success due to a clever Super Bowl advert, so this is a serious investment to make. 

2023’s edition is going to be especially exciting because of the Audience cohorts that the NFL provides.  In an informative report by YouGov, we can see that brands have every demographic from Gen Alpha, the Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers available for targeting in a number of valuable segments.  Food and Bev, Auto, Finance & Insurance, retail, travel and hospitality, and more – the Super Bowl’s reach spans every vertical and most businesses. 

In a time of economic uncertainty, paired with the sizable investment required for all Super Bowl ads, all of these brands are counting on their customer data and First Party data strategies to support them.  Knowing that your Audience segments are watching is valuable, and certainly measuring the impact on revenue after the Ad placement runs is going to be the first thing a business wants to do.  But in this new era of Performance Marketing, additional data driven goals are also running in the background to quantify the investment.  

With Data Privacy regulations resulting in a cascading effect of automated Profiling coupled with earned Consent, brands have come to discover that they have a lot in common with respect to their respective First Party data tranche.  New tech environments like Data Clean Rooms have unleashed the capability to share customer data responsibly, allowing brands to not only target a highly valuable cohort on the most popular media platforms streaming on Super Bowl Sunday, but to actually follow up with that investment throughout the myriad partner opportunities available afterwards.  

Winning Super Bowl Ads are Powered by a CDP
The Customer Data Platform remains the most important step in this exciting new development.  Without coming to the table with a trusted, high-fidelity First Party dataset produced by the brand itself using CDP automation, none of the fantastic capabilities in The Trade Desk’s Galileo platform for unified identity nor the valuable Clean Rooms offered by major media publishers like NBC, CBS, or Disney will have the intended effect.  The UID2.0 Identity standard that The Trade Desk promoted into existence (and is supported by a significant number of respected companies like AWS, LiveRamp, ID5 and more) has bridged the gap between advertiser and publisher, allowing brands to link a First Party cohort from one event (like the Super Bowl) to another. 

For example,  Brands can now understand who is watching their commercials throughout the NBCU digital landscape, and then carry over these campaigns into the Disney-ESPN digital landscape in lockstep — all linked to a universal profile whose successful impressions and conversions are being tracked in the CDP. 

Forming the Super Bowl “Audiences” of the Future
The benefits go beyond Advertising.  By having common identity tokens on the Open Web integrated into Clean Rooms, Lookalike modeling and Incrementality exercises see their value scale in tandem with investment levels, because these efforts can now measure multiple campaigns using the same ID within multiple Publishing platforms.  The CDP fuels a consistently updated profile and Audience set, which in turn becomes the fuel for dynamic campaigns that span one event or platform, to another.  That affects other objectives in a positive manner as well.  Frequency Capping can now be applied cross-channel, fulfilling the promise of a true Journey-based plan that can incorporate intelligent suppression or retargeting based on results that occur outside the brand’s own website or app.  

That’s what Tealium directly supports by automating the collection of First Party data the moment it surfaces, forming the Super Bowl Audiences of the future, and connecting all of it to the right technology platform that is streaming the big show!  All in real time, fully compliant with CPRA and GDPR, the CDP is the secure customer intelligence that your brand can carry with it to every event, every Clean Room, and every Publisher opportunity.

Whether your brand is counting on Rihanna for a halftime show that rivals the one that Prince once delivered, or if it’s set to show content right before the 4th Quarter two-minute warning (cliffhanger alert!), a CDP is the first step to scoring the first touchdown in what should be a blowout win for your Marketing strategy.  When you own your customer data, tapping into that Super Bowl segment is going to be part of the strategy to improve Customer Experience, Personalization and Loyalty.  

That’s a good thing for the consumer, a great thing for Marketers, and the makings of an awesome Super Bowl LVII!

For more information on how you can inspire a better experience with your customer data, schedule a free demo today.