Fetch has ramped up its infrastructure to handle up to 20 million users flooding its app Super Bowl Sunday, drawn in by a $1.2 million livestream money drop tied to its first Big Game ad. The high-stakes moment poses a major technical and brand challenge for the rewards app, as social media will be watching—and reacting instantly—determining whether Fetch’s Super Bowl gamble pays cash or crashes under pressure.

Fetch’s contest is the kind of real-time marketing moment made for the game, with social side quests, cross-promotions with other brands and calls for fans to act fast. Meanwhile, Fetch will compete with dozens of other brands for the attention of audiences on mobile screens as other advertisers also plan complex digital campaigns to reap their own rewards from flashy $7 million to $8 million Super Bowl TV buys. 

Super Bowl LIX represents a different era for brands on social media, as the landscape has been fractured and beset by new potential pitfalls over the last year. “This Super Bowl, maybe more than any time in history, is going to be really difficult to figure out where everyone’s going to be, because people are so fragmented because of platform distrust and people don’t really know where to go,” said Carly Duris, senior communication strategist at agency BBDO NY. 

If all goes well during the Super Bowl, Fetch CEO Wes Schroll will give away $10,000 a second on the livestream. If there is a livestream fail, Fetch has a Plan B. It would switch to Instagram, its main social channel, to alert participants about where to follow the results of the giveaway, Birk Cooper, Fetch chief marketing officer, told Ad Age. Cooper expected that the tech will work come Sunday, since Fetch did a dry run. “We did one two weeks ago, just to our current users and got about 150,000 people there,” Cooper said. “We worked out a couple bugs, and we’re ready for the big show.”

Fetch has billed the campaign as “the last ad,” since it runs at the two-minute mark of the fourth quarter. The brand teased the spot primarily on Instagram, and it also ramped up on X (formerly Twitter), Cooper said. Fetch’s Instagram and X accounts have been posting about chances to win more in-app rewards and puzzles that tease its commercial.

Most Super Bowl brands are using social to get fans to participate leading up to kick-off on Feb. 9 in New Orleans. Doritos used social channels to promote the revival of its “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. Instacart collaborated with mascots and spokespeople from brands that sell goods through its app, including Old Spice Guy, Heinz’s wiener dog, Jolly Green Giant, Kool-Aid Man and Pillsbury Doughboy. While speaking at Ad Age’s Super Bowl Playbook virtual event, Jasmine Taylor, Instacart’s head of consumer marketing, identified Instagram Reels and TikTok as core channels, with X and Instagram’s Threads as places for brands to chat.

The Super Bowl is a chance for marketers to unleash their full arsenals, from unhinged social media posts to mascots popping up in the comment sections. But where these meme-ifications will take place will be far less guaranteed than in years past.  

Solve for X

X, formerly Twitter, has long been the de facto real-time platform for Super Bowl conversations between brands and fans (and brands among each other). But since Elon Musk took over X in 2022, many brands remain reluctant to return to the platform after going quiet. 

The X accounts of Big Game advertisers Totino’s, Reese’s, Dove, Coors Light, Nerds and Pringles have been mainly inactive on X, according to their timelines. They predominantly continue to engage with customers who mention, or “at,” them on X, but original posts have been sparse. 

Some brands that have been shy on X in recent years may return for the game. 

Coffee Mate, for example, did not have a post on X dated prior to May 2024, but last week returned with a Shania Twain teaser for its first Big Game commercial. On Tuesday, Totino’s Pizza Rolls restarted posting to X after its last original tweet was dated November 2022. The new message was a nod to Chazmo, the sloth-like alien character featured in its Super Bowl spot, also starring comedians Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson.

“We’ll be engaging with fans on several social platforms, including X,” Andrea Williamson, a spokesperson for General Mills, which owns Totino’s, said in an email to Ad Age. “This is part of our overarching strategy to leverage advertising’s biggest stage to help us expand Totino’s Pizza Rolls from a regional darling to everyone’s favorite way to eat pizza coast to coast.”  

Reese’s seemed to restart its X activity last year in February, with posts during Super Bowl 2024, after halting messages. Before that, there was a gap in Reese’s X timeline between April 2022 and February 2024, and since then the candymaker has a lone repost on its main timeline. A representative for Hershey’s did not immediately return a request for comment about its plans this year. 

X is still a powerful Super Bowl conversation-starter, according to marketing leaders. It has an NFL hub, which is a portal to league content that is isolated and considered more brand-safe than the chaotic main feed. The hub is filled with vetted posts, but that also lends to a more sterile atmosphere than the main feed. 

Musk has had a choppy relationship with ad agencies and advertisers. He’s considered a mercurial figure, and he’s even sued a slew of brands alleging that they colluded to deprive the platform of ad dollars. 

“The truth is, most brands if they’re on X, they are on there organically. They’re not spending money,” said Amy Luca, head of social at agency Monks. Brands shouldn’t delete their accounts, Luca said, adding that “smart, organic posting does make sense, but it's not a brand safe platform, unfortunately.”

X is trying to regain trust in the marketplace, and in September hired Angela Zepeda, former chief marketing officer at Hyundai, to head its global marketing team. In an interview with Ad Age about the Super Bowl, Zepeda said that X proved to be ahead of the curve with its content moderation policies, noting that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently adopted similar rules to X. Zuckerberg promised a lighter censorship touch and ditched third-party fact checkers, instead allowing the community to append notes to misinformation. X has a similar system. “Things are starting to coalesce and come together where I think social is getting to a level of agreement of how it's all supposed to work,” Zepeda said.

X has seen about 70 of its top 100 advertisers return to spending on the platform, and there are ad tools that steer sensitive brands away from unwanted conversations, Zepeda said. There also is a new video product, which is a full screen offering like TikTok. The NBA is developing a separate portal within X, too, like the NFL’s, where the league and authoritative accounts would dominate the timeline, Zepeda said. The NBA’s more-controlled hub within the main X app is expected to launch later this month around All-Star Weekend, showing the pull X still has with live sports, Zepeda said. 

TikTok shock 

TikTok is another social platform in crisis, as the app flirted with an exodus last month in a showdown with the U.S. government. The app, owned by China-based ByteDance, won a reprieve to continue operating temporarily. The commotion around TikTok emerged as brands were planning for the Super Bowl, and the uncertainty about its fate affected their decisions on where to allocate spend and target campaigns during the game, ad leaders told Ad Age at the time.

“It’s been a dramatic month leading into the Super Bowl with everything happening with these platforms,” said Kathleen Wisniewski, strategy director, social platforms, at agency McKinney. “What platforms are actually going to exist at the time of the Super Bowl, was a question we really had to ask ourselves.”

As TikTok careened toward a shutdown, McKinney was preparing. The agency was working with Little Caesars to arrange influencer contracts for its Super Bowl campaign, writing alternative scenarios into deals in the event of a full TikTok meltdown, Wisniewski said. TikTok was only offline for about 14 hours from Jan. 18 into Jan. 19, and many brands picked up where they left off when it returned. “Our campaign is really made for TikTok, like, this is where we think we’re going to get the highest amount of engagement,” Wisniewski said. “So, it worked out for the best, but we were planning for an Instagram-only campaign.” 

TikTok declined an interview for this story but pointed Ad Age to Carl’s Jr. (which is running a regional ad) and Instacart as two brands that plan to be there come Super Bowl.

TikTok is a “crucial platform” for Carl Jr.’s Super Bowl activities, Jennifer Tate, chief marketing officer at CKE Restaurants, said in an email to Ad Age. The regional burger brand is working with TikTok star Alix Earle for the game, but it does not have a national spot. Earle has 7.2 million followers on TikTok and starred in posts for the burger-maker that began posting on Wednesday about their team-up.

Meta, Instagram’s owner, and Google, YouTube’s owner, are also in the equation. And there is Snap, which has been aggressively going after TikTok’s fanbase, as has Instagram with Reels videos and YouTube with Shorts. “YouTube will go from strength to strength, probably as a fallout from whatever ends up happening with TikTok,” Luca said.

There are new entrants, too, such as BlueSky, the app that is trying to syphon users from X.  The app is still considered almost too nascent for brands to get approvals, especially from legal teams, to let it rip for Super Bowl, according to marketing leaders. Companies should get a hold of their handles, however, so they control their brand-names, marketers said.

As for Snap, Uber Eats and Nerds were both advertising on the app, according to a Snap spokesperson. This week, Nerds released an augmented-reality lens on Snap, which puts a virtual Nerds Gummy Cluster monster character into people’s videos.

“Everybody who’s in the game tends to spend a lot of money on all of these platforms,” said Nick Miaritis, chief client officer at VaynerMedia, which is handling Duracell’s first Super Bowl ad. “YouTube, Meta, TikTok, X, it’s just that you almost can’t afford to not be there spending heavily if you truly are going to maximize the return on the investment.”

But Duracell is taking a different approach ahead of the game on social, mainly because it is keeping its creative under wraps until it airs on Super Bowl Sunday. As a result, its new spokescharacter, the muscly, bespectacled Duracell Scientist, has been absent from the brand’s social channels for the past few weeks. Instead, the brand is looking to find breakout moments on game day to get involved. 

“We treat it as like five hours, basically, of live ideation and execution to try and win attention by being the best we possibly can for whatever gets presented to us,” Miaritis said.

Brands are looking for key storylines to emerge to dip into the Super Bowl chatter. Kendrick Lamar— whose song “TV Off” on his latest album featured the lyric “Mustaaaaaaard,” prompting a subsequent deal with Heinz—will perform during the halftime show. Last year, Heinz built outdoor and social media campaigns noting its association with the condiment, and returned to the theme for its marketing during the Grammys this week. It remains to be seen how Heinz capitalizes on social during Lamar’s performance at the Super Bowl. 

Taylor Swift is also expected to attend as she did last year to root for boyfriend and Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce. Her presence at Super Bowl 2024, and through the playoff games, set up a veritable social media feast for any brand with a connection to the singer. Last year, Reese’s played up its association with Jason Kelce, brother to Travis Kelce, and the candy posted to Instagram with a comment under an image of its new flavor, saying, “in our caramel era.” That was a nod to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Sheertex, the tights brand, jumped on the fact that Swift wore its brands to the AFC Championship Game. 

This year, however, there has been far less social chatter throughout the season to Swift’s presence at Chiefs games. 

President Donald Trump is also expected to be in attendance this year, speaking with Fox before the game. It will be interesting to see what brands, if any, comment on Trump’s attendance. Most brands have taken a safe approach with the creative in their commercials, with the advertisers mostly avoiding political and hot-button subjects. “Everyone is politics-phobic at the moment,” Monks’ Luca said.

And there will surely be in-game surprises to stoke conversations. Last week, after the Chiefs won the AFC championship game, Buffalo Bills fans complained on social that the game was rigged, igniting a firestorm of comments. An X post from eye-care brand Lasik got 4.1 million views: “Still literally offering all NFL refs free LASIK,” the post said.

Ultimately, what brands have learned is to take advantage of the platforms while the attention is there, while at the same time utilizing the Super Bowl to build their own direct connections to consumers. 

“You can’t just do a straight up TikTok campaign or straight up Twitter [now X] campaign anymore,” BBDO’s Duris said. “Brands need the merch, the behind the scenes on TikTok, Instagram static posts, and direct e-commerce integrations.”

Chill your face

To this end, while Coors Light focused much of its social efforts on Instagram to promote its “Case of the Mondays” message, it also built its Super Bowl campaign around sending people to its online store. There, it sold out of a novelty “the chill face roller,” which was a hit on Instagram. The spoof face roller cost $20 on the Coors store, and they were being listed on eBay this week for sometimes more than $100. 

Coors does not have an organic presence on TikTok, as alcohol is a sensitive category for the platform given a large portion of its audience is under 21. Coors also does not have original X posts, outside of replies, on its timeline prior to 2023. The Super Bowl campaign is geared to send people to shop.coorslight.com and CoorsLight.com/Mondays.

With its commercial, Fetch is building its own high-stakes moment with the ad leading to the extended livestream. The commercial also has a QR code that will send newcomers to the app. The Super Bowl reached 123 million viewers in the U.S. in 2024, and popular commercials have been known to inundate brands’ sites. In 2022, Coinbase advertised its app through an enigmatic, bouncing QR code in its Super Bowl  commercial, and then had technical challenges handling the flow to its site. When consumers flocked to download the app, the brand trended, in part, for its inability to manage the traffic.

“That's a massive problem to solve in itself, just on the scaling side and making sure that our systems can handle not just that many concurrent viewers of a livestream, but also that many signups within seconds or a minute,” Fetch’s Cooper said. 

The game is about more than just where the brands go on social media, but also where the money goes. Super Bowl advertisers are experts at teasing their spots ahead of time and backing the commercials with paid exposure on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and beyond. Official Super Bowl advertisers also compete with Super Bowl-jackers, companies that aren’t in the game but still in the marketing around it. For instance, on Tuesday, Kia announced it is running a “game within the game” to give away cars during the Super Bowl. The sweepstakes focuses on Instagram and TikTok and drives people to a special website Kia set up for the campaign.

During the game, more than 60% of viewers are on social media, according to Kaela Green, senior director of product and social at digital ad agency MiQ. “We’ve worked with partners to plan big splashes in social,” Green said in an email to Ad Age. “Instagram then TikTok are at the top of our list. X and YouTube are players some consider as well.”

Aside from paying up, there is more opportunity now than ever to catch the algorithm on any given platform and ride that to unstoppable view counts, VaynerMedia’s Miaritis said.

“It’s the TikTok-ification of media,” Miaritis said. All the platforms have been angling for TikTok’s crown. They are "sensing a little bit of blood in the water," Monks’ Luca said.

TikTok blazed the path to a new social environment where any content can catch fire. The app rose to popularity by signal boosting videos from any casual user, creator or brand regardless of follower counts or fame. Instagram, YouTube, Snap and X have tried to mimic that content meritocracy, according to Miaritis, and there is now a unique chance for brands to trend wildly.  

“The Super Bowl ad content, in the algorithms of today’s platforms, has the potential to get the most organic traction it's ever got, if it's good,” Miaritis.

Contributing: Gillian Follett