Mr Viral
This story is part of Digiday’s annual coverage of the Super Bowl. More from the series →
The Super Bowl represents a high-stakes maneuver for top marketers. Mess up, and you’ve tipped as much as $8 million down the drain. Stick the landing, and you’ll have reached a third of Americans in 30 seconds.
For the most part, the Super Bowl is reserved for brands that have already come to terms with the risks, like Budweiser, which has run big game spots for over 40 years with only a single year skipped, or 11-time returnee Squarespace.
Occasionally, however, we find a contender willing to take a fresh risk. This year, there’s at least three.
Häagen-Dazs, Duracell and MSC Cruises will each run their first Super Bowl spots this weekend. Although they’re each playing within the same 30- or 60-second framework, their business goals, and creative approaches, differ.
And although most viewers will be glued to the small screen during the game, it’s not the only channel of importance. For example, when Squarespace ran its first Super Bowl ad in 2014, its media investment started and ended with a single TV spot. Those days are long gone. “Our approach to paid media and the channels we leverage has changed drastically,” Pamela Piccola-Fales, vp of media and acquisition at Squarespace, said in an email. “Now, we have so many more levers at our disposal.”
Brands today commonly look to amplify the impact of their Super Bowl TV activity with a battery of digital ad investments, particularly in paid social and CTV. In addition to the $7 million to $8 million required to run a 30-second ad during the big game, advertisers might devote up to 25% of their overall Super Bowl budget to such channels, estimated Kevin Goodwin, vp of digital marketing at New Engen.
Digiday spoke with top marketers from Super Bowl newcomers Häagen-Dazs, Duracell and MSC Cruises to explore why they’ve decided to spend on the Super Bowl now, where else they’re spending and what return on their investment they’re hoping for.
Häagen-Dazs
Ice cream companies traditionally don’t move much product in February. Häagen-Dazs hopes a Super Bowl spot can help it change that habit.
The General Mills subsidiary is the best-selling ice cream brand in the U.S., but it wants to generate more interest in its “ice cream snack” products (the kind that come on a wooden stick, rather than a in pint) via a single spot featuring “Fast & Furious” stars Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez.
“The Super Bowl is obviously a huge stage, and it’s also a very big snacking occasion,” noted Häagen-Dazs’s head of marketing Rachel Jaiven, who added that the brand aimed to entice millennial consumers to buy a broader range of ice cream products throughout the calendar year.
In the past, Jaiven said Häagen-Dazs would have concentrated its ad budget (which totaled $41.5 million in 2024, per Kantar figures) between April and September. Following a 2021 brand reset, she said, “over the last couple of years, we have been investing more broadly across the year.” Without providing specific financials, she said late March and early April as well as Q4 represent new periods of focus. This year’s star-studded Super Bowl ad represents a shift in gear of that strategy.
“It’s a very big increase in our spend versus Q1 of prior years because of the Super Bowl … it helps us stand out,” said Jaiven.
Anticipating rising interest in halftime show performer Kendrick Lamar, Häagen-Dazs has booked ads against his videoback catalog on Vevo, and sponsored Super Bowl halftime show-themed playlists on Spotify.
“We also have some pre-roll and high-impact placements around the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise and action category films,” she added. In a follow-up email, a spokesperson for Häagen-Dazs said those placements were booked on NBCU streaming platform Peacock.
Alongside the TV spend, the brand is increasing the “intensity” of paid spend across Meta, YouTube Shorts, TikTok and out-of-home through to the end of March.
Duracell
Duracell’s Super Bowl wish is to extend its grip on the household battery market in the U.S.
To do that, it created a new mascot character and spun up a campaign, launched back in October, that focuses on the proprietary “Power Boost” technology in its products. Its single Super Bowl spot will “anchor” that activity, Ramon Velutini, president of North America and Latin America at Duracell, told Digiday.
Via agencies Vaynermedia and EssenceMediacom, the brand is surrounding that TV activity with digital video spend and paid social including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X.
“There’s no better stage to introduce a character and communicate your brand message than the Super Bowl,” Velutini said. He argued that, at $7 million per 30 seconds, the Super Bowl is a relative bargain. “My point of view is that it’s not only fairly priced, but it has the potential to be undervalued,” he said, “when you think about the amount of people that are watching.”
MSC Cruises
For its first Super Bowl campaign, MSC Cruises has a straightforward ambition. “Our goal is to get people on our ship,” said Allison Smith, the cruise line’s svp of marketing.
The company is a leading cruise operator in Europe, but a “challenger brand” in the context of the U.S., she added. Accordingly, it wants to break into the American market and make itself “a household name,” said Smith. “What better way to do that than the Super Bowl?”
The scale of the big game, when set against declining TV viewership away from the floodlit world of live sports, underpins that case. “The monoculture is largely dead. Attention is highly fragmented and scattered,” said Goodwin. The Super Bowl, by contrast, is a “very rare, unique moment where attention is hyper-concentrated.”
MSC’s single 60-second spot stars Drew Barrymore and Orlando Bloom as they extol the virtues of European-style sailing on the company’s new vessel, MSC World America. The brand’s media agency of record is OMD, while it’s working with Kantar to track the impact of the campaign.
Though Smith declined to provide a breakdown of MSC’s overall campaign budget, she said it’s following Sunday’s spot with a two-week “blitz” combining digital spend and cable TV, including “local heavy ups” in regions key for success in the market (particularly Florida and New York).
The brand’s digital media mix will prioritize TikTok, Meta platforms Instagram and Facebook, and CTV channels including YouTube “for incremental reach,” Smith added.
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