Less than 24 hours after the Kansas City Chiefs clinched their win at Super Bowl LVI (54), advertisements for the following year’s game started airing across media properties owned by ViacomCBS.
CBS is taking over the rights to the NFL’s annual championship game from the Fox network for the 2021 airing of the Super Bowl, and the network’s parent company is going all out on promotion even though the game is still a year away.
Commercials promoting Super Bowl LV (55) started airing this week on cable networks owned by ViacomCBS, including MTV and Comedy Central, the company announced in a press release on Tuesday. Those commercials are part of a cross-marketing initiative that will see similar advertisements on other ViacomCBS-owned properties, including over-the-top service Pluto TV.
A ViacomCBS executive said the company is applying lessons learned from its cross-platform promotion ahead of this year’s Grammy Awards telecast, which aired on CBS late last month.
“The Grammys were the perfect starting point for cross-portfolio marketing because there are so many customer touchpoints across Viacom brands, MTV and VH1 especially, that made sense for a big collaboration,” Mike Benson, the company’s chief marketing officer for CBS, said in a statement.
That promotion generated 40 million cable TV impressions and 80 million social media impressions in the days leading up to the Grammy Awards thanks in part to a prime-time special that aired several days before the awards show on MTV and BET and follow-up segments on “CBS This Morning” the week after the show.
ViacomCBS will now be taking the same approach over the coming year as the network sets the stage for Super Bowl LV.
“Running promos across media networks is important,” Benson said, “but really good marketing works well when you’ve got creative, interesting ways to engage people that may not necessarily look like marketing.”
Super Bowl LV will air from Tampa, Florida across CBS-owned and affiliated broadcast stations on February 7, 2021.
