Tom Brady is the greatest football player of all time. And at the end of every season, speculation swirls about whether this will finally be the year he retires. Given that cultural context, we knew our Hulu Sellouts campaign could leverage this hype to get people to pay attention to Brady’s big announcement that Hulu Doesn’t Just Have Live Sports.

By partnering with the greatest football player of all time, we were able to create an epic misdirect on a monumental scale. It all started with an uncaptioned, ambiguous photo that Tom Brady posted to his social media accounts. Given the context of his potential retirement, fans and the media went wild wondering about what it meant.

Then, on Super Bowl Sunday, with millions of fans waiting for any update from Tom, he calmly broke the news that Hulu doesn’t just have live sports.

Throughout the Sellouts campaign, we’ve paid our athletes tons of money to let everyone know that Hulu Has Live Sports – and instructed them to be incredibly clear about that transaction. But the campaign had become so effective that consumers were forgetting about everything else Hulu offers.

To let the world know that Hulu doesn’t just have live sports, we needed to create our most impactful sellout yet. So we used the conversation around Tom Brady’s potential retirement to create a classic misdirect on a massive scale.

Every element of this campaign was crafted to make the public believe that Tom Brady would be announcing his retirement.

The black-and-white photo Brady posted in the days before the Super Bowl was taken from the spot itself, chosen to elicit maximum confusion and conversation. Completely in shadow, it’s almost impossible to tell if Brady is walking in or out of the stadium.

For the spot, we used tropes from traditional retirement videos: cinematic stadium shots, black and white film, and Brady’s all-black outfit. After the turn, where Brady reveals that this is actually an ad for Hulu, we added heavy branding throughout the stadium to play up the reveal and increase brand recognition.

Tom posted the spot to his Instagram shortly after it aired, which generated even more conversation.

The campaign delivered more than 2.5 billion earned impressions through PR and social media mentions. Overall, it was the 2nd most talked about Super Bowl spot. The campaign also increased year-over-year Hulu + Live TV sign-ups by 25%.