With over 110 million viewers, the Super Bowl is the most-watched event in the US. And a YouGov study showed 52% of adults say they get excited by watching the commercials (significantly higher than the second-place Olympics, at only 29%). So, without having our own ad in the Big Game, we saw an opportunity to harness the excitement around all the other ads and turn it into our biggest Helpful act yet. We looked back through previous years' ads and tracked the various clichés that most commonly appeared. We then planned our own "Helpful Bowl" event, where we would donate money to Boys and Girls Clubs in Southern California for every Super Bowl LI ad that featured a cliché. This way, while watching every other brand's Big Game ad, Southern California would be thinking about the Helpful Honda guys.

Not having a Super Bowl ad meant we had to focus a lot of our efforts on raising awareness of the Helpful Bowl before the event. A high reach/frequency :30 TV ad that explained our event aired during the 2 weeks leading up to it. We ran three :15 pre-roll spots on YouTube, before other brands' Super Bowl ads and targeting viewers interested in the Super Bowl and NFL. A radio spot and DJ chatter blanketed SoCal's airwaves. We also delivered 100,000 Helpful Bowl pizza boxes from more than 140 restaurants across the region. Everything drove consumers to HelpfulBowl.com, a landing page where they could play along. Our game-day viewing party took place at The Boys and Girls Club of Hollywood, where we broadcast live updates over Twitter and Facebook live video. The entire event was filmed, and a :30 recap spot was shipped just a few days later.

Despite not having a Super Bowl spot, we successfully inserted SoCal Honda into the Big Game. Our combination of nimble media buys drummed up 54 million impressions, in a market with a population of 16 million. We were able to increase social engagement by 404%, and over 4,000 people submitted scorecards online. Perhaps most importantly, we drove website traffic up by 1,011%, recording the highest day of traffic in our 3 years of tracking. Beyond meeting our clients' objectives, every major SoCal news station covered the event, and national online coverage reached an additional 18.5 million unique visitors. In the end, the Southern California Honda Dealers made an impact during the Super Bowl without even being in it, utilizing a campaign of carefully-selected media channels that all reinforced the position that they really are Helpful.