MTN DEW was launching Major Melon, their first permanent flavor in a decade, during the Super Bowl. So while there would be a huge audience, there was also massive competition for attention. With the stakes as high as ever, our challenge was to make an ad that, by design, had to stand out and demand attention.

Rather than shy away from showing our product, we did the exact opposite. We filled our 30 seconds of airtime with nearly 250 bottles of new MTN DEW Major Melon. In fact, we created an imaginative and fantastical world that was a celebration of the new product. And we cast a celebrity (John Cena) to deliver the single line of dialogue which was the invitation to join our game - be the first to count and tweet the exact number of Major Melon bottles shown in our ad, and you’d win $1,000,000. The contest began immediately after the commercial ended so the audience had to watch our commercial over and over again to play. Then to enter, they had to share their guess and our hashtag with all of their friends on Twitter. Making #MTNDEWMAJORMELON trend for the entire game, just behind the official #SuperBowlLV.

In the Super Bowl, your target is anyone watching the game. So you have to appeal to everyone. Yet over 80% of the Super Bowl audience spends the game staring at their phones on social media. Some might see that as a disadvantage for a new product launch. But we decided to use it in our favor. Since most people would already be on their phones, we created a social-first game that took place within our Super Bowl spot. Because Twitter is the most popular platform for Super Bowl viewers, we made that the epicenter of our contest. And with $1,000,000 at stake, we gave them a compelling reason to not just look at our product, but actually count every bottle in the ad. To enter, all they had to do was tweet their guess to @mountaindew with #MTNDEWMAJORMELON – which was of course, the name of our new flavor.

Rolling out a campaign centered around a :30 game posed serious challenges. Most Super Bowl ads are released days, or weeks, before the game to maximize exposure and social media conversation before the game. Our ad, by design, could not be released before. So in the weeks before the Super Bowl, we put out two teasers that explained the rules of the game to everyone on social media. We also used our social media to teach people to count bottles of MTN DEW Major Melon. We even used a new Twitter post function to announce the exact moment the ad aired – and our game started. And once the ad aired, we had worked with Twitter to create a system that could reply to every entry with a unique GIF, keeping them engaged with the contest, and more importantly, with the brand.

We were the #1 brand on Twitter, with 35% of all mentions. In fact, #MTNDEWMAJORMELON trended at number 2 on Twitter—behind only the official #SuperbowlLV tag, and ahead of every other brand.

We also had the #1 digital share of voice. with 21.8% of the entire conversation. our ad was the most mentioned ad in the Super Bowl. 400,000 total mentions on Twitter, with 99% positive sentiment – including 112,000 mentions within five minutes of the ad airing. There were 31,000 mentions of MTN DEW Major Melon per minute.

Our launch delivered 2x the sales and velocity of past product launches.

We had 11.3 billion overall earned media impressions, and a total of 4 billion social impressions. In 2021, all 67 Super Bowl ads had 63 billion total social impressions.

Nearly 52 billion of them were for our campaign alone.