The Super Bowl is the year’s biggest and most competitive marketing moment. Where $5 million buys you a 30 second TV ad and the 100 million viewers that come with it. And every year it’s the same - brands trying to outspend and outdo each other with ever-more elaborate, celebrity-studded, or purpose-driven TV spots to win the battle for attention on this massive marketing stage. Skittles’ brief was simple - get Super-Bowl-sized attention, without spending a penny on the Super Bowl broadcast.

For this year’s Super Bowl we skipped the 30 second TV commercial and instead made a 30 minute Broadway musical.

Strategically, the Skittles brand is all about disrupting the predictable. And what’s become more predictable than the Super Bowl itself? Year after year, the marketing playbook is the same. From the TV ad tropes to the celebrity studded films and macho sport conventions, it’s pretty much the same year after year. Without the budget or the broadcast slot to compete on this traditional stage, we knew the only way Skittles would get noticed was by creating an entirely different stage, altogether. To get attention for the brand, we were going to have to steal it, by subverting the Super Bowl entirely.

For the Super Bowl, we wrote and produced a 30-minute Broadway Musical, complete with original music and lyrics that we performed live in a Broadway theater.

We announced our show with Times Square billboards and branded busses.

And then sold we tickets. People spent over $200 to see an ad, and the show sold out in 72 hours!

As buzz built, we announced our show would feature celebrity Michael C Hall.

Then, while every other brand was celebrating advertising, we released a music video of our title track

‘Advertising Ruins Everything.’

And for the millions not lucky enough to score tickets, we released the original cast recording album on

Spotify.

On Super Bowl Sunday we debuted our show live with a 17-member cast and full band. We sold authentic souvenirs– T-shirts, posters, vinyl records. And we even created and sold bootleg shirts outside the theater.

Without spending a penny on the Super Bowl broadcast we ended up with over 2.5 billion earned impressions - over 25 X the viewership a TV ad receives on the big game. The campaign was covered in over 1000 publications and news broadcasts, and the show was even reviewed by the New York Times and Washington Post theater critics. And, most importantly, it resulted in a 5.6% increase in Skittles consumption.