Stella Artois is a beer brand that champions savouring time together with those you love, so the Super Bowl is a key moment in the calendar. 77% of Super Bowl shoppers purchase beer and 41% either host or attend a viewing party.

It’s also the most difficult time of year to get through to consumers, with anywhere between 60 and 70 ads shown during the big game. Rather than just make an ad like every other brand, we decided to hack the superbowl instead with a influencer campaign that started before the game and was talked about long after.

The Super Bowl is an epic cultural event. But every year thousands of bartenders, waiters and cooks have to work the game instead of enjoying it with their friends and family. In 2022, Stella Artois pulled something new out of the playbook, creating a Trading Places story for the modern age. We assembled a team of ex Super Bowl winners ready and willing to come off the bench and work restaurant worker and bartender shifts on Super Bowl Sunday. NFL superstars Eli Manning, Dan Marino and Ryan Clark swapped their shoulder pads for aprons, their helmets for tip jars, and took to tending bar and making pizza, all while hardworking service staff got to go to the Big Game and savour time with the ones they love.

Substitutes play a vital part in any Super Bowl. But as a brand that wanted to encourage people to savor time with loved ones, we realised Stella could use the potent sporting symbol of a ‘substitute’ in a radically different way. Instead of on-field substitutes, our strategy was to find famous ex-superbowl winners that could be our substitutes for service staff in bars across the country. This meant we’d guarantee signifcant media interest by using highly relevant talent to do a job they’d never normally do, in service of landing our brand point of view - which they did during high-profile national media interviews.

We kicked things off with three online films that showed our Super Bowl stars surprising the bar and restaurant workers at their jobs and giving them tickets to the Big Game.

Short format films were released on social channels channels on the 9th of February the week before the Super Bowl alongside our three 60” films.

This was followed by talent media interviews with high profile national TV stations such as Good Morning America just before the Superbowl to further build buzz.

On the day of the Super Bowl, while the bartenders were on their way to the Sofi stadium in Inglewood, the NFL stars clocked in at their bars to work the busiest shift of the year, serving beer and making pizza for football fans.

The stunt garnered 996 mentions in the press, 19.8k mentions in social media and 1.37 billion earned impressions in total. Importantly, 95% of coverage landed our key brand message - helping create one of Stella’s most successful ever Super Bowls in terms of sales.