The Super Bowl ad Molson Coors waited more than 30 years to make features brands that never before appeared together in advertising. And it resolves an ad prediction contest that plays into the growing popularity of sports betting as part of the brewer's partnership with DraftKings.

Read: Ad Age ranks the Top 5 Super Bowl 2023 ads 

The 30-second “High Stakes Beer Ad” from Droga5 makes reference to the company’s long freeze-out from the Big Game as a Coors Light drinker and a Miller Lite drinker argue and eventually battle over which beer the ad is supposed to be for. The punchline comes from a third Molson Coors-owned beer, Blue Moon.

The brewer of Coors Light, Miller Lite and Blue Moon has been shut out of the Big Game due to exclusivity agreements rival Anheuser-Bush InBev had made with broadcasters since 1989. AB InBev relinquished that deal starting with this Super Bowl, opening the game up to Molson Coors and other alcohol brands. Rémy Martin, Crown Royal and Heineken (for its alcohol-free 0.0 brand) also advertised for the first time this year; AB InBev is running four ads (two for Michelob Ultra and one each for Bud Light and Busch Light).

Molson Coors took little time deciding to buy an ad following AB InBev’s announcement last June that it would relinquish alcohol exclusivity.  But there was much to decide about which brand or brands would be featured, Molson Coors Chief Marketing Officer Michelle St. Jacques said in an interview.

The company brought in several agencies to hear the brief and was open as to whether their pitches focused on a single brand or a portfolio. The first item on the brief, St. Jacques said, was “to make Super Bowl history.”

“We didn’t want a vanity idea, but an idea that would really strengthen our brands or brand,” she added, describing the brief. “We wanted to make sure we could obviously sell a heck of a lot of beer, which is our responsibility. And the last [point] was around building pride. That might be one you don’t often see in Super Bowl briefs. But for us as a company, for our distributor network, the idea of ‘let’s have an idea that people can get behind and be proud of’ was an important part of our brief.”

Droga5 was selected on the strength of a pitch to include both Miller Lite and Coors Light in the spot.

“It’s a rare situation where there are two very iconic beers that have pretty similar size and similar standing in culture,” said Kevin Weir, executive creative director at Droga5. “And so seeing them work together in the same campaign is really exciting creatively.”

St. Jacques acknowledged the concept broke the rules at Molson Coors.

“Internally, we always had a thing at Molson Coors where we say, you never put Coors Light and Miller Lite in ads together, because these are our two big premium light brands and are our number one and number two brands in our company,” she said. “The idea of putting them together was always like a total no-no, you just don’t do that. In fact, this is the first time ever, in the teaser leading up to the Super Bowl, that we had those two brands appearing in the same ad before.”

Those teasers, including a full-page New York Times ad that played upon the question of which beer deserved a Super Bowl ad, showed the distinct positioning of the two brands—Coors Light about refreshment, Miller Lite about great taste, St. Jacques said. “I think the reason we can [feature both brands] now was because we've spent the past few years really building up the clarity of what each of those brands stands for.”

A ‘now’ idea

The Droga5 pitch had another unusual element, which was to partner with an online sportsbook to gamify the ad, allowing people to participate in a prediction pool about what they would see. The free-to-play contest, hosted by Draft Kings, will award $500,000 in prizes. More than 257,000 entries had been made by the time the contest closed at 3:30 p.m. ET today, helping DraftKings win new signups and the entities to collect participant data.

“The amount of betting culture that’s become mainstream got us thinking,” said Chris Colliton, executive creative director at Droga5. “Millions of people are going to be betting on the Big Game, and it seemed like it was only a matter of time before this kind of passion point bleeds into advertising as well. And so we knew we wanted to do something that had never been done, we really wanted to make a moment that stood out from everything else… why not bleed into the space as well and get that kind of engagement?”

St. Jacques was thrilled with the idea. “People have been predicting sports since the beginning of time, and more recently with the online traction of a platform like DraftKings, it’s become bigger and bigger … It feels like this was a ‘now’ idea,” St. Jacques said. “It was an idea that we needed to do now or we would regret it forever if we didn’t.”

With half a million dollars on the line, secrecy was such that just three people—St. Jacques, Weir and Colliton—knew all the details. The ad was only shared with other stakeholders until after the contest closed. To help keep the secret in production, eight different endings were shot.

The best fans could surmise about the commercial came from the questions in the DraftKings contest. That gave away that the ad would take place in a bar, that something would shatter, and there’d be a chance to see either dancing animals, “high-octane martial arts,” “mega explosions,” or a celebrity cameo, among other clues.

St. Jacques predicted the Molson Coors ad would be one “where people are going to stop and lean in to watch this spot, not only because they haven't seen it, and it’s going to be one of the few they maybe haven’t seen. But also, they might have real money on the line. So they’re going to lean in to say, ‘Did I get the right thing?’

“We keep joking that people are not going to be getting a snack during the spot or going to the bathroom,” she continued, “They're going to be sitting there being like, I want to see what’s going to happen in this spot.”