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The Super Bowl just got a little bit more aromatic.
Downy is returning to the Big Game for the first time in 11 years. The Procter & Gamble brand will promote its Unstopables product.
The 30-second ad will air during the second quarter and feature a celebrity who is a skeptic of Unstopables’ 12-week freshness guarantee. The only problem is we don’t know the identity of the celebrity.
“What we find is consumers have a hard time believing that Downy Unstoppables could actually last as long as the the brand claims that it can last,” said Jenny Maxwell, P&G’s senior brand director of North America Fabric Care. “We thought what better thing to do than launch our Super Bowl ad way ahead of the Super Bowl.”
To start the two-month long guessing game, Downy is dropping a 30-second teaser clip of a hoodie-covered celebrity hiding their identity until the Super Bowl to see if the long-lasting claim is true. The clip also stars a talking Super Bowl puppy.
“We felt like this strategy added a little intrigue to keep engagement focused on Downy and Unstopables,” Maxwell told Adweek.
The magic of 11
The campaign was created with P&G’s Woven Collaborative, a multi-agency collective co-led by executives from WPP’s Grey and Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi. Saatchi & Saatchi, which has worked with P&G’s Tide, is the agency working on the Super Bowl spot.
“The beauty of this campaign is that it goes back to that tension that is created by what the consumer thinks of the product,” said Ciro Sarmiento, chief creative officer of Woven Collaborative. “We have an incredible product with an incredible truth, which is the long-lasting scent. There’s also an incredible tension from the consumer, which is people usually don’t believe in [advertising and marketing] claims.”
Downy’s Unstopables product was introduced 11 years ago, which was the last time the brand was in the Big Game.
In the 2012 spot, Downy recreated Coca-Cola’s classic 1980 Super Bowl commercial “Have a Coke and a Smile” starring former NFL star “Mean” Joe Greene. In Downy’s remix, actress Amy Sedaris played the precocious youngster offering Greene a bottle of Unstopables before rejecting his sweaty jersey.
Downy is taking an interesting approach to building up interest in the celebrity reveal. There was significant content filmed ahead of the release and there should be multiple characters and Easter eggs featured along the way. Maxwell said the campaign will run nine weeks (63 days or 1,512 hours) up to the Super Bowl reveal on Feb. 12.
“It’s something that will have interesting touch points all throughout December during Christmas, January and February,” Sarmiento added.
“That’s the beauty of it, because people will have plenty of opportunities to see or not see the celebrity because he doesn’t want to show his face of course, but to interact with him and ask questions. There’s a lot of aspects that will spark curiosity among consumers and people on social media.”
The Super Bowl return for Downy comes amid P&G’s recent decision to pull back on marketing spend.
Fox, which will carry the Super Bowl on Feb. 12, says it has sold out 95% of its in-game ad inventory, with 30-second slots going for upwards of $7 million.
For Super Bowl 56, 30-second Super Bowl ad slots went for as much as $7 million during NBC’s broadcast in February.
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