10 American football contest ideas for Super Bowl marketing
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According to the Nielson ratings, of the 10 most watched events in US history, the only one that isn’t the Super Bowl is the moon landing in 1969. If you run with that thought, statistically, short of planting the stars and stripes on extra terrestrial soil, there is no event that can trump the Super Bowl for the American public.
This is in part because it’s more than just a football match. In the whole year, globally, that single event delivers the biggest musical performance, the craziest, biggest budget ads with the biggest stars, and typically Drake’s highest value bet to date.
While 30 seconds of ad space will reportedly set you back a cool $7 million (and that’s before you shell out $10 million to get Ben Affleck to star), the commercial opportunities around the Super Bowl aren’t limited to huge corporations with seemingly bottomless pockets.
Whether your business is directly involved with football and sports, or if your business is adjacent, or even seemingly completely divorced from the big game, a significant percentage of your audience is going to be tuning in to see who gets to lift the Lombardi trophy. This means myriad marketing opportunities, and if there’s one communications medium that speaks the language of American football, it’s gamification.
Here are our best original online contest ideas and marketing game concepts to help you get new eyes on your brand, create excitement within your community, and drive sales.
1. Super Bowl Halftime Homemades (Video Contest)
A big part of the anticipation for a lot of people with the Super Bowl is the halftime ads. Where else will you see Sir Patrick Stewart hail Mary throw everyone’s favourite animated 9-year-old with a football-shaped head for a “hole-in-one before the seventh inning-stretch” while Creed play in the background? How else would you realise you needed a Twins reunion of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito promoting State Farm Insurance?
If you haven’t got the marketing budget for A-listers, you can still get in on the Super Bowl ad hype train by passing the ball to your audience to generate some UGC.
Smartphone technology has come on so much that now people are shooting and editing high quality videos on iPhones and Android phones that surpass what a lot of purpose-built camera equipment could do just 10 to 15 years ago. And more and more people are getting creative thanks to the availability of this technology.
Invite your audience to create a Super Bowl ad for your brand using Drimify’s Video Contest game engine. Just give them the brief: “Create a Super Bowl ad for our brand.” Then let the most creative productions shine.
Make it a contest: The Video Contest game engine allows you to moderate the content, so you can approve the best entries to be included in a Voting Gallery. You can share some of these across social media to help promote the Voting Gallery, and then you’re able to double your engagement. You get the creative, willing to step-up types with the Video Contest, and you get everyone else with the Voting Gallery.
Why this works: There are more creative people than there are opportunities. If someone goes and actually produces a mega hit of an ad, it could be their ticket into a whole new career. It helps you because they make you an ad, it helps them because they’re getting exposure.
Brands this works for: Any brand. Food and beverage companies, TV channels, insurance firms, milk alternatives, and even tax software, so there really is no more versatile concept than this.
2. Special Teams Showdown (American Football)
No marketing game is better coded to the Super Bowl than a customized American Football Game!
Customize the background, the logo on the ball, and the advertising hoarding behind the goal posts, and invite your audience to play as special teams, making those all important field goals! Give them a set number of attempts, or set the timer – whatever works best for the experience you want to deliver.
Enable the leaderboard: Sports fans are here for the competition, so enabling the leaderboard makes the game instantly more compelling and more shareable on social media.
Connect multiple American Football Games to a global leaderboard: Why not create some sustained engagement, or even mimic the season? Connect multiple games to a Leaderboard Combo™ and call it “The Road to the Superbowl,” with tickets or exclusive prizes for the best performers.
3. Quarterback’s Quest (Dynamic Path™)
If you’re reading this, and organising a marketing campaign around the Super Bowl, chances are you know a fair bit about football, so forgive me for stating the obvious.
The QB is basically the most important player on the field. A great arm is one thing, but they need to be master tacticians, and make fast and effective decisions under pressure in the heat of the moment.
Give your audience the quarterback experience with a quest made up of different games. The different games are grouped, so as levels are completed, the player travels from the QB starting position, all the way to the end zone.
What’s this for? This is a true gamification experience to let you communicate with football fans in a variety of ways. Include point-scoring games to contribute to an overall leaderboard, but also include multimedia content, like promotional videos, and intersperse instant win games to deliver consistent excitement all the way through.
This is for any brand which either has a lot of different product types to promote, or a brand that’s going particularly hard for the Super Bowl.
4. Gridiron Word Search (Crossword and Word Search Game)
Football may be the domain of the jocks in high school movies of times gone by, but the numbers don’t lie: every strata of society is full of people who love football, and that includes your more loquacious and intellectual audiences too.
Challenge them with a branded Crossword and Word Search Game, whether that’s finding obscure football terms or solving player names through clues. You can use the pop-ups and intermedia screens to get across your branded messaging, and even enable the leaderboard so you can reward the highest performers with a prize draw.
5. Running Back Renegade (Pacman)
Your mascot or branded character takes the place of Pacman and plays your renegade running back. They just run around the maze scooping up footballs while defensive tackles take the place of the ghosts, or “enemies.”
Your product takes the place of the power-up items, giving your players the power to run through the defence and collect more footballs.
Who this works for: Supplement brands, energy drink companies, coffee chains. If you sell a product that puts more pep in people’s step, this is a great gamification concept to reflect that and tell your story.
6. Hail Mary Pass (Wheel of Fortune)
A Hail Mary in football is denied as “a long, typically unsuccessful pass made in a desperate attempt to score late in the game.” But then a Hail Mary results in a touchdown, there’s no sweeter victory!
Recapture that magic with instant win games like a branded, Super Bowl-themed Wheel of Fortune.
What this concept does best: This is ideal for distributing prizes and promo codes, and is a great inclusion in loyalty programs and apps.
7. Armchair Experts: Super Bowl Edition (Survey)
Ask your audience a series of multiple choice questions with a Survey before the Super Bowl game, and reward the true armchair experts after the fact.
Questions could include:
- Who’ll win?
- What will the final score be?
- Who’ll be awarded the MVP?
You can use a combination of multiple choice and open questions to make it easier to sift through to find the people who called it right, open with a multiple choice: “Who’ll win the Super Bowl? Team X or Team Y?” Any player who gets that wrong can be discounted from getting the win.
Why this works: Whether it’s a genuine insight into the game, ravenous fandom, or deep hubris, sports fans love to think they can call the outcome. Tap into this to engage with your audience.
Modulate it to your audience: If you’re speaking to more casual fans, keep it chilled out. If you’re speaking to a diehard football audience who like to get into the weeds, by all means ask questions relating to possession time, passing yards, rushing yards etc. to have a smaller pool of winners.
8. Most Valuable Fan: Super Bowl Edition (Quiz)
Put away the crystal ball and focus not on Super Bowls future, but Super Bowls past, or maybe even just the season so far.
Fans like to show their fandom. Human beings are naturally show-offs, particularly among their own tribes, and this is especially the case when it’s something they’re passionate about like football.
Customize a Quiz made up of multiple choice answers, and give the format of the questions some variety. Include videos and ask “What happened next?” Give them stats questions, test their retention of exciting or unusual incidents, enable the leaderboard, and see if you can find the real MVF to reward with a prize.
Pro tip: Assign profiles to score percentages to make the game more shareable. These can include specific call to action buttons (CTAs) to take users to strategic pages of your website.
9. Super Bowl: New Fan Guide (Combo™)
Super Bowl LVIII was a different beast. Taylor Swift started dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and the result in football viewing figures – particularly in traditionally harder to reach demographics for the NFL – surged to record highs.
That influx of new fans, coupled with ever more ways to watch around the world, means there are more eyes on the Super Bowl than ever before – and quite possibly, more people wondering what on earth is going on…
This creates a great opportunity to target those new fans through gamified marketing – simultaneously educating them on your own brand and-or product, while helping them learn the ins and outs of football. Create multiple experiences and connect them all through a Combo™, allowing you to deliver a longer form, more immersive experience.
For example, you could start them off with a Video Quiz, where they see videos of various plays, and have to answer the questions to show they understand what they’ve seen, then you could send them seamlessly into an American Football Game, and use the text fields in the experience to explain the concept of special teams. This reinforces what they’ve learned by putting it into practice with compelling gameplay.
You could send them through as many stages as you like, delivering them straight from experience to experience, but it’s often a good idea to finish with an instant win game to distribute a promo code or other prizes. The bigger prizes act as bait to increase participation, while the promo codes help you drive conversions.
Key to success: All gamification requires marketing – after all, who’s playing a game they don’t even know exists? – but this is a very specific segment you’re targeting. There are so many ways this could be worked to your advantage depending on what your business is, but you need to focus on the nexus or meeting point of where their interest in football and potential interest in your product lies.
Find that target, and set your marketing team after it like a ravenous pack of wolves across social media.
10. Super Bowl Halftime Show Stoppers (Voting Gallery)
For some, the halftime show is the main attraction. Usher, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, The Weekend, Madonna… the list goes on and on and on.
It can be the highlight of a performing artist’s entire career.
This is why creating a Video Contest and inviting your audience to perform their own halftime show could be a great way to tap into part of what makes the Super Bowl the Super Bowl.
Moderate the entries so only the best make it to the connected Voting Gallery, and use some of those highlight performances to promote it on social media.
What brands does this work for? Really any company that’s even vaguely adjacent to singing and music. A record company, a radio station, a music platform, a chain of venues, or even a popular music publication for a few examples.
Expert advice
People LOVE team sports, and for Americans, football is THE team sport. They tap into people’s childhoods, their fascination with highly skilled individuals pushing themselves as hard as they can, and they tap into their sense of community and pride of place.
Gamification is a great way to tailor your marketing to appeal to sports fans, and create optimum conditions for maximizing sales and appealing to new audiences. Because of the participatory element, as well as collecting user data for every user action, building marketing games and online contests on Drimify is the ideal way to supercharge your marketing strategy and multiply your engagement rates.
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