A category underdog, Anytime Fitness is tremendously outspent by big budget rivals in the fitness landscape. Brand awareness and consideration are lagging far behind category juggernauts like Planet Fitness. The brand needs to maximize its reach and salience. Attention is the #1 goal.

Super Bowl’s massive stage represents the ideal opportunity. The timing couldn’t be more relevant either: New Year resolutions have been abandoned by February and consumers are looking to reset - to get back on the proverbial ‘horse’ - post Super Bowl.

But how do you capitalize on the Super Bowl’s unmatched reach and salience if you can't buy your way in with an ad? We needed to elbow our way into the conversation without dropping $7M on a single ad.

We set ourselves an audacious goal: Get Anytime Fitness an unfair share of Super Bowl buzz during this jam-packed marketing moment, by earning attention, not buying it.

Since we couldn’t afford to buy our way into the Super Bowl spectacle with a $7 million ad, we decided to subvert it entirely.

How? By turning the Big game into a big game.

This inspired our Superbowl hack: Anytime Anytime. Anytime anyone heard the word “anytime” said during the Super Bowl broadcast and tweeted #JustHeardAnytime they could win a trip to any Anytime Fitness in the world.

Anytime’s biggest differentiator was how accessible it was. With 5000 locations in 50 countries, 24 hour access, and personalized coaching for anybody, you can literally start your fitness journey at Anytime Fitness anytime (like anytime the word anytime is said during the Super Bowl).

Because we didn’t have the advantage of millions of eyes on a tv spot, we wanted to take advantage of the moments when Super Bowl conversation was highest: 5 days ahead of the game and during the game. A week before the game, we seeded our pre-game content through a heavy online push to get national lifestyle and industry publications buzzing. We followed up to get more than our fair share of attention by engaging with fans on game day, enticing them with our epic prize. We set out to get significant earned attention with the combination of high consumer engagement and a high-value prize.

We seeded the idea in the week leading up to the Super Bowl, by releasing three entertaining videos that described the Anytime Anytime sweepstakes, as well as several social posts, and OOH in the Phoenix airport that encouraged fans going to the game to help get the word “Anytime” on to the broadcast.

During the actual game, we engaged directly with fans watching the game at home, commenting on close calls, like times similar words were said, or celebrating the THREE times the word “Anytime” was said.

Our campaign garnered 37 Million impressions, 18 million video views, and +998% Engagement. This included more social mentions than SEVERAL brands that paid to have a commercial in the game, such as Miller Lite, e-Trade, Booking.com, and T-Mobile. The #JustHeardAnytime was used 5.96k times. And Anytime Fitness saw 10PPT Brand Favorability.