The Super Bowl, for ages it’s been seen as marketing’s biggest stage. Where $5 million dollars buys you 100 million eye balls for 30 seconds. But what if there was an even bigger stage, where you could have even longer and more meaningful engagements?

Enter Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical. Instead of following the 50 years of established Super Bowl wisdom, we skipped the 30 second TV ad, and made a full 30-minute Broadway Musical.

We started by announcing our show like any good Broadway Musical would, with a Times Square media blitz including billboards, branded tour busses and a national print campaign in the country’s most popular entertainment publications.

And like any Broadway musical we sold tickets. That’s right, people spent over $200 to see an ad. As the New York Times Pointed out “A price that minute-per-minute beats the cost of top-tier seats for ‘Hamilton.’” Not only did people buy tickets, we sold out in 72 hours, donating all $100,000 in proceeds to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

As buzz built, we announced the star of our show. But instead of the usual celebrity expressing how delighted they were to be part of our ad, our film featured Michael C Hall expressing his reservations about being in a musical ad on Broadway.

Then, as other brands were celebrating advertising during the biggest marketing moment of the year, we released a music video of the title track ‘Advertising Ruins Everything.’

A song about how manipulative and horrible advertising can be.

Next we released the original cast recording album on Spotify. Yes, our Super Bowl had a full original Broadway cast album.

On Super Bowl Sunday we debuted our show at Town Hall Theater on 43rd and Broadway. 1,500 people lucky enough to get tickets, along with the invited press and influencers, arrived and found a bunch of authentic souvenirs for sale – T-shirts, posters, vinyl records. And like any genuine Broadway Show, we even created and sold bootleg shirts outside the theater.

The show itself was an irreverent, self-aware look at advertising and marketing in culture. It featured a full cast of 17 and a live band.

So could a musical ad on Broadway generate Super Bowl sized conversation without the Super Bowl sized spend?

The campaign got written about in over 1000 publications. Our ad was even reviewed by the New York Times and Washington Post Theater sections! It ended up with over 2.5 billion earned impressions. Over 25 X the viewership an ad receives on the big game. All with $0 dollars spent on the actual Super Bowl.

Skittle Commercial: The Broadway Musical was even voted the #1 funniest ad on the Super Bowl by Forbes. As Wired mentioned “The Future Of Super Bowl Ads Doesn’t Include TV – Or Football.”

Skittles - Broadway the Rainbow

CREDITS

Heard City

Vault 49

Giannini Creative

Mill London

Blacksmith TV

Gold partners