This work drafted off the biggest sports entertainment event of the year in the US: the Super Bowl. Not just the game itself, but the way sports fans and pop culture fans enjoy the game. They pay close attention to every aspect: the game itself, the commercials, and the halftime show. We took all those engaged eyeballs and ears, and gave them something to pay attention to.

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.

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. For example, anytime the word anytime is said during the Super Bowl.

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. It’s a simple sweepstakes: 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.

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.

Winning the “pre-super bowl” buzz stage.

Over the last few years, invariably, a lot of the attention leading up to the game was focused on ads – we decided to take advantage of all the attention on super bowl ads leading up to the game to get an unfair share of pre game attention.

Hijacking the Second Screen

Americans toggle multiple screens while watching the Super Bowl. The last few years had proven that engaging fans on social media during the big game was just as important as having an entertaining spot. We wanted to hijack the conversation online and win the second screen.