The New England Patriots weren’t the only ones to win big in the Super Bowl, as four advertisers who took a bet on overtime ads scored a deal of a lifetime in the advertising world. And one of those lucky four advertisers? Online lender SoFi, also known as Social Finance.
According to an article in The Wall Street Journal by Mike Shields, SoFi was one of at least four advertisers who committed upfront to buy these discounted ads. Hulu, Sprint, and Proactiv were the other three who negotiated for overtime slots.
After making a major play at the Super Bowl last year, SoFi decided to focus more of its time this year on March Madness.
However, it ended up getting extremely lucky when the Super Bowl went into overtime for the first time in history.
From the article:
Before the game, SoFi had inked a deal with Fox to run a Super Bowl ad if–and only if–the matchup went into overtime.
SoFi said the ad option cost less than half of the roughly $5 million that Fox was charging for 30 seconds of commercial time during the game’s four quarters.
The way these deals work is that brands agree to authorize the ad buys, and Fox runs the ads if the game goes into overtime. If overtime never happens, no money ends up changing hands.
As the Patriots began their furious rally in the second half, Chief Operating Officer Joanne Bradford and her team started to realize “this is gonna happen,” she said. They started galvanizing the company’s workforce, including making sure the website had enough server capacity and telling people who man SoFi’s call centers to get into the office.
The article noted that SoFi only started thinking about buying a Super Bowl spot a few weeks ago and produced the ad for less than $10,000.
And it paid off for SoFi. The article stated the ad bet caused traffic to spike 100 times higher than normal.
Check out the full commercial below.
