Initially, Rocket Mortgage was rebuffed in its effort to stage a Super Bowl singalong.
A staple of Super Bowl Sunday advertising and a two-time winner of USA TODAY’s Ad Meter contest, Rocket’s new chief marketing officer, Jonathan Mildenhall, was determined to maximize a campaign built around the use of John Denver’s iconic tune, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
And after a summit between Rocket and its creative and ad agencies resulted in a creative blurting out something unprecedented – ‘Why don’t we do a live singalong at the game?’ – Mildenhall was obsessed.
Yet overtures to Fox Sports were initially rebuffed, citing the many logistics and unusual ask on such short notice. A half-measure – a pre-recorded, pregame singalong – was hatched.
“I agreed on a compromise and honestly my enthusiasm for the idea had diminished from say a 10 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10,” Mildenhall said this week. “It would still be historic – we’d be shooting and producing an ad in the stadium and that’s never been done before.
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“But we wouldn’t have had that live magic.”
Yet just two weeks before Sunday’s Super Bowl, Fox Sports had a change of heart. The singalong was a go.
“At that moment in time, I about threw up” says Mildenhall. “Because the risk is apparent.”
And midway through the second quarter Sunday, the vision came into focus.
NFL Network reporter Colleen Wolfe beseeched the crowd inside the Superdome to embrace the moment and, moments after the Philadelphia Eagles kicked a field goal to take a 10-0 lead.
Fans on the stadium screen were engaged in the moment, and shortly thereafter, it was back to football.
With that, the annals of Super Bowl advertising can cross off yet another, as Mildenhall calls them, “NBDBs,” or, Never Been Done Before.
Certainly there have been live activations within the game before. In 2023, the NFL’s ad featured a plausibly live shot of Erin Andrews – she’d dressed in the same outfit to pre-record the bit – within the stadium as the protagonist of the commercial, flag football star Diana Flores, eludes stadium staff portrayed by NFL stars.
Yet capturing the attention of a live audience, urging them to sing along right on the heels of an advertisement, all within a 15-second window that extends your ad buy to 75 seconds? That’s a far trickier proposition than your garden variety card stunt.
This is where Rocket anticipated “Country Roads” would do most of the heavy lifting.
While also dovetailing with the former Quicken Loans brand’s appeal to potential homeowners, the song crosses cultures deftly, from postgame salutes at West Virginia University to Japanese karaoke bars and cover versions by Lana Del Rey, Toots and the Maytals and Reina del Cid, among others.
“When I really started to appreciate how affectionate Take Me Home, Country Roads is to all demographic groups of America, it was very clear that would be the appropriate bedrock,” says Mildenhall. “As we started to play it in the commercial, we started to think more ambitiously about not just being an advertiser but being an activator for this year’s Super Bowl and get the stadium to sing along just after the commercial break.
“It is unprecedented, but because of the affection America holds for Take Me Home, Country Roads, that in itself is mitigating some of the risk.”
Well, scratch another one off the Never Been Done Before list.