While other Super Bowl sponsors like Instacart, Pringles, and Bud Light heavily feature celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sabrina Karpetner, and Post Malone, Tecobus won’t do anything like that.
Instead, the small leather apparel company plans to air commercials that are already frequently streamed on YouTube and other media venues. Krista Dalton, the company’s chief marketing officer, says hiring celebrities doesn’t feel authentic. “We don’t put boots on feet that don’t want to wear boots,” she said in an interview, and the commercial, which depicts a boy exploring the West while featuring real cowboys, paid off. “We don’t think this ad has reached a saturation level where people feel like they’ve seen it millions of times before. We think a lot of new viewers will see this ad.”
The Tecobus commercial won’t air on NBC during the Feb. 8 broadcast of the big game, which will feature the Seattle Seahawks vs. the New England Patriots, but it’s still a Super Bowl commercial.
As more people disconnect from traditional TV and turn to streaming video, some of the country’s biggest media companies see an opportunity to generate additional revenue. NBC sold a number of streaming-only ads that appeared on Peacock during the Super Bowl LX simulcast. This spot typically appears during advertising time reserved for local broadcast stations and is viewed by a smaller, but younger, audience than those watching network television. This gives NBCUniversal the opportunity to seek nearly $3 million for a 30-second ad, according to people familiar with the matter. Additionally, similar to Super Bowl TV ads, streaming-only commercials require “matching” with other NBC ad inventory, or potentially an additional $3 million.
Streaming gives Tecovas a chance to step into arenas that would normally be impossible to enter. NBC is seeking $7 million to $10 million for a 30-second TV ad for this year’s game, which Dalton said is completely outside Tecobus’ range. “I think if you spend a lot more than you budgeted for, you’re going to have some questions that you’re going to have to answer for quite a few people,” she says.
Streaming-only Super Bowl ads aren’t new. Financial services company Ally aired the show on Paramount+ during the 2024 Super Bowl, which aired on CBS. Fox and NBCUniversal have offered such services in the past, according to two people familiar with the matter. But the service is starting to gain more traction as some advertisers act as if their commercials will be seen by millions of TV viewers.
WK Kellogg’s Raisin Bran enlisted actor William Shatner to promote its high-fiber cereal. ELF Cosmetics cast Melissa McCarthy in a location that evokes the soapy feel of Spanish-language “telenovelas.” Oikos will run the streaming-only spot with Kathryn Hahn.
The Super Bowl has long served as a bastion of mass marketing. It’s hard to think of any other media outlet that gives advertisers a stage in front of so many potential customers. But in recent years, more marketers are looking to use the big game to reach smaller, niche audiences, taking note of the fact that they leverage new technology and take advantage of interactive media like streaming, which allows ads to be placed based on geography and knowledge of consumers’ likes and dislikes.
“Big games have evolved from a single broadcast opportunity to a multi-screen ecosystem, and our strategy reflects the changes in the way modern audiences, especially younger generations, consume games,” he says. Doug VanDeVelde, Chief Growth Officer, WK Kellogg Co. The company’s acquisition of Peacock could help it gain greater traction at a more affordable price, he added.
Further partial placements may be under consideration. Inside Disney, the company is eager to find a way to leverage its various assets to offer versions of the Super Bowl telecast tailored to different audiences, including sports enthusiasts, children and families. Such experiments have already surfaced. For example, in 2024, advertisers could run Super Bowl ads only on Univision, which had the rights to broadcast the game in Spanish. Some relied on ads that appeared only on Nickelodeon, a popular children’s cable show that aired family-friendly television. Some were only able to run ads on the version streamed on Paramount+. Of course, many opted for the original television broadcast, which is widely distributed on CBS.
The rise of streaming is giving some Madison Avenue enthusiasts the opportunity to do in a big way what they’ve been doing quietly for years. In other words, it’s a cheaper way to get in front of a Super Bowl crowd. Over the years, advertisers ranging from Sam Adams and Heineken to American Family Insurance, Procter & Gamble and the Church of Scientology have taken over the local advertising time available on the various stations tied to the networks broadcasting the Super Bowl. For the average Super Bowl viewer attending a party or snacking on buffalo wings, it’s hard to tell the difference. Still, ad buys cost millions of dollars less than commercials that air on national time. Streaming changes the game somewhat by giving advertisers the opportunity to be seen by viewers across the United States, rather than just viewers in a specific region.
Oikos, a yogurt made by Danone, aired commercials during the traditional Super Bowl for six years. This time, for the seventh time, Peacock will run ads featuring celebrities Kathryn Hahn and football player Derrick Henry. That way, “we can reach a younger audience,” said Victoria Badiola, senior vice president of Oikos Danone US. “Gen Z and Millennials are demanding more mobile, more on-demand and more flexible viewing experiences.”
ELF views the streaming spot as “an important test-and-learn moment for us,” said Cory Marchisotto, the company’s chief marketing officer. The cosmetics brand’s desire to stand out is as great as any Super Bowl TV advertiser’s, and the spot was inspired by Bad Bunny’s monologue during this season’s first episode of “Saturday Night Live,” in which he told viewers he had four months to learn Spanish before appearing on the Super Bowl halftime show. Marchisotto says ELF shot an ad with McCarthy just a week ago, and McCarthy provided enough material for something even more ambitious.
“At the end of the day, I looked at the director and said, ‘I think we just shot a 30-minute movie,'” she recalls. “It’s not a 30-second commercial.”
Streaming-only ads may only reach a portion of the Super Bowl audience, but they’re important enough to capture the attention of a very important audience: the NFL. Like its TV pitches, the league is scrutinizing streaming ads for elements that could potentially offend viewers. “You’re still going through the same thing,” Marchisotto says. “We had to go through a lot of gates.”
