Lauren Fried, founder and managing director of Pulse Marketing, appeared on last night's Gruen (8 October) – the ABC hit show about everything advertising, which this week examined the NRL and AFL Grand Final weekend.
Brands in Australia could take a leaf out of the Super Bowls’ book and invest in more clever campaigns in the lead up to the NRL and AFL finals.
While the main focus for brands was to advertise during the broadcasts of Australia’s favourite footy codes, the real smarts are extending your Grand Final reach by advertising before the game when people are preparing.
Supermarkets and alcohol brands have data to tell them Grand Final supplies such as food and drinks are being purchased, and they should be vying for their customer’s attention then.
In the US, the Super Bowl is the second biggest day of the year for food purchase and consumption, so you’re better off focusing on the target audience behaviour across the whole day or the lead up to, rather than just during the game. Food supplies were probably purchased in the lead up, cold beer was bought on the day.
Brands in the US have mastered using “owned media” during the Super Bowl – the most watched broadcast in the US yielding about 114 million viewers across the country. And being contextually relevant and responding in real time through social media channels can amplify your message way beyond the people watching the game. The Super Bowl commercials have also now become a cult with people tuning in just to see how brands will tackle their advertisements to coincide with the theme of the sport.
There’s owned, earned and paid media, and the sponsors and advertisers should have been leveraging all of them during the Australian AFL and NRL Grand Final weekend.
Brands had a great opportunity to use their owned media to be clever and engage with their audience. They do a brilliant job of this in the Super Bowl, however, most of the brands here fell short on this over the weekend by mostly just using
paid media.
While some brands find it difficult to launch campaigns through the fog of grand final fever, putting campaigns on hold due to the school holidays, or holding the budgets for the pre-Christmas advertising blitz, brands relevant to the AFL and NRL audiences could certainly have done more.
Unless it was a brand that was deeply embedded in the football, or October was the specific month to be doing something (like Oktoberfest) then there is a strategy in launching your campaign a month from now and capturing the Christmas dollar through an ongoing campaign leading into December.
However, there were a vast array of brands that could have been super clever and taken a leaf out of the Super Bowl’s book in the US – where the art of advertising on that monumental weekend has become legendary.