During the Super Bowl, over 103 million Americans expect to be entertained by the best advertising. We found something all ads have in common, something that we could point out while staying true to our brand: clean clothes. If the characters in an ad are wearing clean clothes, doesn’t that make it a Tide Ad? With this premise, we turned every ad into a Tide ad, without once showing a single stain - something Tide hasn’t done in its 70-year history. The program kicked off with a :45 in the first quarter with David Harbour, a rising actor famous for his role in “Stranger Things,” setting up the idea. Harbour appeared six more times in stereotypical Super Bowl ads as well as iconic spots like Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Can Smell Like,” and even as part of the broadcast.

#TideAd took control of the Super Bowl on the live broadcast and on the second screen. This required us to use the 100 seconds of our media buy and turn them into a long running question: is every ad a #TideAd? We launched the idea with a :45 second spot in the first quarter. We followed up with a :15 in the second quarter, two :7.5s stitched together for the third quarter, two :05 broadcast integrations and a final :15 right before the end of the game. All of them featured unexpected appearances from David Harbour in other ad genres. This innovative use of media kept the audience guessing every commercial break if the next ad would turn out to be a Tide ad. Throughout the program, Tide also leveraged online video, social media and influencers to keep viewers engaged with #TideAd.

#TideAd was used over 45,000 times, with people creating their own #TideAd content, generating thousands of Tide ad memes, and even won Twitter’s #BrandBowl. After the game, our program was picked up by 680+ publications, garnering over 3.6 billions impressions. The program helped launch Tide’s new line extension, Tide Ultra Oxi, which experienced 35% sales growth, post game.

This year Tide won the Super Bowl by turning every ad into a Tide ad, a game-changing idea that redefined the brand. This required the brand to hijack other commercials, the live broadcast, collaborate with partner brands, and generate an ongoing conversation in social media. It even resulted in “It’s a Tide Ad” memes, turning a detergent brand into pop culture.

During the Super Bowl, millions of viewers go online to comment on and scrutinize every ad of the broadcast. To own the social conversation, we found something all ads have in common, and gave people a filter through which they could judge every ad they saw: the presence of clean clothes. With the unexpected appearance of David Harbour hijacking different commercials, we kept the Internet guessing in each commercial break. This was reinforced by interactions with other brands, real-time response to live events (including an unexpected blackout during the game broadcast), and tweets from David Harbour on Twitter. People talked and laughed about laundry, questioning many of the commercial as to whether they were #TideAds. And, of course, thousands of memes.

Tide challenged us to become “the most loved brand of the Super Bowl” and surpass the highly-successful “Bradshaw Stain” from last year. Keeping that in mind, and knowing we had to go big in order to earn the love of over 103 million watching the game, we decided to take over the Super Bowl and turn every ad into a Tide ad. We knew the best way to get people talking about detergent and laughing was to get them to rethink the other 53 ads, and hopefully every other ad to come.