One of America’s largest advertisers uses the most-watched television event of the year to focus on a small portion of its potential customer base.
Consumer products giant Procter & Gamble is doubling down on a strategy it adopted last year, airing local commercials during the Super Bowl instead of the more popular (and expensive) national big game. In 2025, P&G ran local ads for its pet-friendly weedkiller Spruce in 19 markets across the South during the Super Bowl. This year, ads for Spruce will air in 36 markets in the South, and commercials for the Zevo flying insect trap will air on 46 different stations.
NBC plans to air the Super Bowl on February 8th and is seeking $7 million to $10 million for 30 seconds of national advertising time. Ads on local stations showing the great bars will be much cheaper, and Proctor will be able to delve into entire specific regions of the United States.
“We think it’s really important to show up in big, bold and unexpected ways,” Spruce senior brand director Jessica Etelson said in a recent interview. The Spruce ad features a story about a dog trying to get out of the house to enjoy life, with The Baha Men’s 2000 hit “Who Let the Dogs Out” in the background. Jivo’s spot demonstrates the ease of trap, reworking Bonnie Tyler’s 1984 single “Hold Out for a Hero” into “I Need a Jivo!”
More marketers are adopting regional strategies to approach the Super Bowl, hoping to avoid the high costs of national advertising while targeting more specific audiences tied to geography and trends. Some have taken to local stations to try to defeat their right to exclude certain categories of other advertisers from the national stage. Yes, local advertising for the Super Bowl will cost more than a regular Sunday, but it’s much cheaper than a national spot.
As the costs of national big game campaigns skyrocket, some Madison Avenue residents are trying this ploy. Anheuser-Busch InBev has been advertising Busch local time for several years, and rival beer companies like Diageo and Sam Adams have also adopted the strategy. United Airlines and American Family Insurance also used the station in the not-too-distant past.
Jeff Kraft, Zevo’s senior brand director, said Procter & Gamble’s focus on the South is aimed at informing consumers about its products, who will soon be dealing with late winter temperatures. As the weather gets colder, more consumers will start paying attention to gardens, gardens, and the natural environment.
“In the southern United States, bugs occur year-round,” he points out. Zevo’s ads aim to “help consumers understand how effortless and efficient it is” to use traps, he says, using scenes of insects attracted to food to drive that point home.
In the past, P&G used the Super Bowl to draw the attention of millions of potential customers to its Tide laundry detergent. But Spruce’s use of a local strategy in its first ad in 2025, which showed dogs having a big pool party outside in a yard, helped increase consumer awareness of the product, Etelson said.
Both executives believe that the ads’ attention in the South will generate small talk and casual comments that will reach consumers in other parts of the country, creating potential interest in similar ads when they move to other parts of the country.
They’re not going to run ads for both Spruce and Zivo one after the other during commercial breaks, but Procter & Gamble executives wouldn’t be upset if they did. “We traffic them separately,” Ettleson said. In some parts of the country, “we just hope they show up together.”
