Did it work? To an extent.
The 6.8 million people who watched the Citrus Bowl on ABC was the seventh-largest audience out of 43 bowl games and the largest New Year’s bowl viewership not linked to the national championship. EDO found that ads during the Citrus Bowl outperformed the average primetime ad by 52%, and the average bowl game ad by 16%. Cheez-It ads during the game outperformed the average Cheez-It ad during primetime by 256%.
But Captify noted that searches for Cheez-it declined 28.7% after the game, dropping more acutely among foodies (60%) and family shoppers (50%). Isaac Gerber, Captify’s global director of insight and analytics, noted that Frosted Strawberry—and not its cheesy colleague—lingered in most people’s memories days to weeks later.
“There’s going to be a winner, and there’s gonna be a loser in the context of those kinds of campaigns,” Gerber said. “In the very crowded space that we have in our heads to remember … people are going to kind of naturally gravitate toward one brand.”
The bigger picture
College football’s national championship between Michigan and Washington drew more than 25 million viewers across ESPN networks—still a fraction of the Super Bowl’s audience and roughly half for what the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills attracted to CBS for the NFL’s divisional playoffs.
However, EDO noted that viewers were 101% percent more likely to engage with ads during the college title game that average primetime ads—and 18% more open to those ads than they were a year ago.
That makes the game an ideal spot to show off AT&T 5G technology like its helmet for deaf and hard-of-hearing players, as well as the Ref Cam, Pylon Cam, Goal Post Cam, First Down Cam, Countdown Cams and other behind-the-scenes coverage. But according to GWI, there are 64 million college sports fans in the United States, and the football championship is just part of its strategy to speak to them all.
Sabina Ahmed, AT&T’s assistant vp of sponsorships and experiential marketing, noted the spiking interest in women’s volleyball, softball and March Madness in both women’s and men’s basketball—among other collegiate sports—has made AT&T consider not only how the brand shows up on signage and coaches’ headsets, but at fan events and panel discussions around game day.
