100m people watch the Super Bowl. This wasn’t a big-enough stage for Chevrolet’s ambition. They tasked us with getting over 1bn eyeballs, to increase consideration of Chevrolet.

Step one is panic. Step two is set about understanding exactly how people interact with Super Bowl Sunday.

The first truth is that most people don’t care about the Super Bowl. 52% of people attending Super Bowl parties are there to see friends, the half-time show and watch commercials.

The second truth is that while they don’t care about the game, they talk about and plan their parties for weeks before the game. This is when they are their most social. Our strategy was to go beyond the broadcast and own the entire Super Bowl conversation. This means more than commercials. We created an app and a music video, and enlisted the support of superstar celebrities to win the Super Bowl.

The Chevy Game Time app is a live second-screen experience designed to hijack viewers’ attention from our competitors and give people a reason to interact with Chevy during the entire game. Players saw prereleased commercials, answered trivia questions, had a chance to win thousands of instant prizes and pushed everything to their social networks.

Everyone who downloaded the app was given a unique license plate. If your license plate appeared in one of our five commercials, the car was yours. This was a reason for players to watch our commercials again, and again and again.

Plus, each time one of our commercials aired, we asked trivia questions about it within the app. This pulled their attention back to our brand and racked up commercial views and interactions with our products.

We scratched an itch that consumers didn’t even know they had, by giving them something to do during the boring parts of Super Bowl Sunday—the Super Bowl game. The Chevy Game Time App had over 700,000 downloads. During the game, over 130,000 people played at one time. Over 21m trivia questions were answered. Chevy Game Time was a featured app in both Android and Apple app stores. In addition, we made it into the top 10 apps in the Apple App Store, passing Angry Birds and Facebook. Our players rewarded us with their attention, and millions of online social conversation throughout the day. Owning the Super Bowl? Now there’s an app for that.