Rocket Mortgage executives first heard the idea over the summer, during a Zoom presentation meeting with creative agency Highdive.
It was still early in the mortgage company’s verification process, which typically lasts weeks or even months. But at the end of the call, marketing manager Casey Hurbis remembers leaning back in her chair and thinking, “Wow, that could be it.
“It doesn’t usually happen that early in the process,” he told USA TODAY Sports on Monday.
Those early hopes for Rocket Mortgages’ two 60-second Super Bowl commercials came to fruition on Monday morning, as the company finished both first and second in USA TODAY’s Ad Meter, which ranks the ads according to the consumer rating.
This is the first time since 2007 that a brand has won the first two places in Ad Meter.
“I was shocked, yes,” Highdive co-founder and co-creative director Mark Gross said on Monday. “You never know how to get in. You think you’ve got something great, but there are 60 places you’re competing against.
“I really think it was just a very simple idea, and the jokes we wrote luckily were funny and resonated with people.”
Hurbis praised the message and the creative direction of the announcement, including Morgan’s performance. But he also detailed the massive behind-the-scenes campaign the company has carried out to create buzz around its spots.
Hurbis said Rocket Mortgage set up a “war room” during Super Bowl 55, with 25 socially distant employees in the office working to coordinate the company’s social, digital, and PR campaigns around its ads in the Super Bowl and the promotion of Super Bowl Squares. 60 other employees attended at home.
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Rocket Mortgage has also appealed to its various partners and asked them to help “expand and amplify” their social media posts, Hurbis said. Several celebrities and athletes who have business connections with Rocket Mortgage – and two official team accounts – urged their respective Twitter followers to vote for the company’s ads on Ad Meter, reaching a combined audience of at at least 14 million users.
“You see a lot of brands, if not all, doing this,” Hurbis said. “It pays dividends in that it broadens the message, and probably a little deeper. Because Rickie Fowler fans may be different than Dave Bautista or Larry Fitzgerald fans. So that’s the ability to broaden the message. creative message and build it. advocacy. “
Rocket Mortgage commercials, directed by veteran Craig Gillespie, ran in the second and third quarters. The first spot featured a cameo from Bautista, actor and former wrestler and actress Liza Koshy. The second commercial had Los Angeles Chargers defensive lineman Joey Bosa flipping a car.
Both Gross and Hurbis have stated that Morgan, of “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock” fame, was heavily involved in the creative process, from working on the script to improvising some jokes on set.
“A lot of times you go to celebrities and you kind of get a yes and a maybe and then it fails,” Gross said. “But (Morgan) was committed the moment he got the script. I loved the idea. The first moment we spoke to him on our first Zoom, he was like, ‘Let’s make it so that’s great. Let’s do better than the Super Bowl. ‘”
Morgan, 52, said in a statement provided to USA TODAY that he was “flattered” that the Rocket Mortgage ads were written with him in mind, and thought it was important to make the Super Bowl laugh after a trying year 2020.
“I love the idea of dramatizing ridiculous moments in life where you want to be absolutely certain and not just ‘fairly sure’,” he said.
Hurbis said filming both commercials turned out to be an arduous process, with a seven-day shoot comprising 18 scenes in 14 different locations. There were stunts and visual effects that had to be added to the ads during the editing process. Production started shortly after the holidays and ended up being a race to the finish line.
“We were doing effects until the day before,” Gross said. “So yeah, that was crazy.”
Rocket Mortgage’s advertisements have also been accompanied by a significant financial investment. CBS billed roughly $ 5.5 million for a 30-second slot during this year’s game, which would put Rocket Mortgage’s price in the $ 20 million range. Hurbis declined to say how much the company paid to run the ads, but said the figures reported by the media were “fairly accurate”.
It was a big swing for a company advertising during the Super Bowl for only the fourth time – and stressful for Hurbis, albeit with an exciting resolution.
“It’s usually the most painful 60 seconds of a marketer’s life because you don’t know how the audience is necessarily going to react,” Hurbis said. “This has been the most tense 120 seconds of my marketing life this year, bringing two commercials to life.”
Contact Tom Schad at [email protected] or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.
