Brands' efforts to expand the scope of their Super Bowl campaigns took interesting and elaborate turns this year. Squarespace created a real album of relaxing sounds by actor Jeff Bridges, which viewers could purchase through DreamingWithJeff.com. Mountain Dew used Snapchat to allow fans to choose the direction of an interactive story.
On game day, agency "war rooms" once again sprang into action across the land to make sure brands were front and center, and, of course, super relevant, in the Twitter conversation around the game. McDonald's conducted an unusual social sweepstakes, Tweeting at and about other Super Bowl advertisers and giving followers a chance to win products by those brands (the Twitter campaign ran alongside the much-discussed "Pay With Lovin'" ad, in which cashiers allowed customers to pay for their Big Macs and nuggets with gestures (like calling their moms) in lieu of cash). T-Mobile sent random Twitter uses "leaked" photos from Kim Kardashian's data stash and Cheerios issued a perfect product-shot reaction to a game changing play in the fourth quarter.
But no one set quite the same kind of big-game tone as Kotex, the first entity to bring "period cravings" to Super Sunday.
Here are some other brands that achieved flow state during Super Bowl XLIX. The list is a short one.
SQUARESPACE "DREAMING WITH JEFF"
In a game that had its share of emotionally manipulative sadvertising, and fear-mongering (dead kids, for crying out loud), Squarespace went refreshingly weird. With agency Wieden + Kennedy, the website service company tapped Jeff Bridges to make an album full of sounds to fall asleep by.