Unruly’s Super Bowl LIV Social Media Campaign

Every year Unruly tests the Super Bowl ads with our product UnrulyEQ to determine which ads were the most effective emotional ads for that year. This year was a little different because we were not producing a physical whitepaper with the findings. The study was going to live solely on our gated Insights page on the Unruly website. And to drive people to the website I worked closely with our Marketing Associate to do a complete social media takeover.

We updated our logo and every social media banner with the main Super Bowl LIV imagery, which was a football with a vintage texture and one of our branded emoji faces. I decided to go with a vintage style for all of the outputs because I wanted to evoke a classic football feel this time around. I also wanted to do something I haven’t done yet with our Super Bowl assets. And because I was producing a lot of digital assets, I wanted a very identifiable theme so everything looked cohesive.

The image to the right was the main graphic and messaging. The texture and deeper color palette really brought home the vintage feel. And the emoji emphasizes the fact that this study focuses on the emotions behind the ads. Unruly is also a very atypical ad tech company, so creating this emoji football plays into our quirky company culture. I also wanted to incorporate the banner because I thought it invoked a retro feel, which is exactly what I was going for.

I produced many assets for all our social platforms with this main football emoji imagery, but also assets for email blasts and blog posts. Below you can also see different iterations of the football emoji used in different social posts and social headers.

There were several assets made for blog posts because our Marketing team had posts planned leading up to the Super Bowl and post Super Bowl. On the right you can see a handful of the different blog posts that utilized the imagery I created, using different common aspects you see associated with football, but designed with the same vintage style as seen in the main imagery. Below you can view all the different blog post imagery iterations that I created.

The color palette I used was an extension of our main Unruly yellow and Unruly EQ coral. I wanted to use darker shades since I associate that more with a vintage feel because it gives it a worn or older appearance.

I also had to create templates for the Marketing Associate to use. Since designers use Adobe, which is a specialized product that not everyone can use, I prepared various templates by setting up different design elements in Powerpoint so the Marketing Associate could then go in and input the necessary information and then export it right away. By creating these templates in Powerpoint, we made the process a bit faster because we took out a step in the middle. The Marketing Associate didn’t have to send me the information and then wait for me to create the assets because they could go into the document and input it themselves.

I created two main templates. One template was for Instagram Stories. There are always some ads that get released ahead of the Super Bowl, so we test ads on a rolling basis. For the ads that we already tested, as they played throughout the game, our Marketing Associate used the Instagram Stories template I created to post about the different results of said ads.

The second template was for the Insights page that lives on the Unruly website, which is where a viewer would go to see the full results of the ad study. The Insights page templates were more specific because they had to include an area for the EQ score, which determined how emotionally successful the ad was.