“I was in the mission control room, watching the numbers just spike as soon as the ad aired, and it was just like a vertical line, up into the millions. So it was fun to watch.” — Birk Cooper, CMO of Fetch
What began as a casual chat with Birk Cooper, CMO of Fetch, quickly turned into an incredibly insightful interview. We dug into how the rewards platform’s debut Super Bowl ad led to a game-changing 1.2 million sign-ups in just two minutes. It was fascinating to hear how they navigated tech hurdles and seized the moment, turning a bold idea into a huge business win.
Miserandino: So, is this the craziest week of your life right now?
Cooper: Craziest four months… Yeah, it was wild. Making an ad isn’t specifically difficult — like it’s difficult to make great advertising, but making an ad, right, like it’s a known thing. This is a whole different thing because we were building the livestream, which we had never done before.
Miserandino: So, this started four months ago. Like, this was not just Tuesday you decided to do this and the rest of the world did it. You must have been hand-to-hand on this for a few weeks.
Cooper: Yeah, I think our tech team had like 103 days or so to build out the tech that powered the livestream. Our app is typically, for those that don’t know, but it’s a rewards platform. So, we’re America’s rewards app. You do different things to get Fetch points, you turn those Fetch points into rewards like free gift cards, things that you buy. So, if you go shopping here, if you buy this thing, scan the receipt, you’ll get points. If you play mobile games, you’ll get points. So, it’s a platform like that where you interact with it. And we decided, once we knew our ad was in the two-minute warning of the fourth quarter, we’re like, “Alright, let’s bring our value prop through to the Super Bowl.” And so we built out the livestream capability to give people money live during that event.
Miserandino: So, when did you realize, “Oh wow, this is going big”? Because it feels like it went big, but I don’t know when you realized it went big.
Cooper: We had huge debates leading up to it, how much traffic we were gonna drive. We have like 12 million or so active users, so we thought, hey, a good portion of those people are gonna come watch the livestream. We have a lot of lapsed users. Super Bowl is a huge draw, right? 127 million people watching it. So there’s this wide range of how many people could potentially come into the livestream. I was in the mission control room, watching the numbers just spike as soon as the ad aired, and it was just like a vertical line, up into the millions. So it was fun to watch.
Miserandino: I recall that, I remember when I was CEO of Inquisitor at the time and we watched when a famous death occurred, and we’re watching the analytics in the server load start to break down, going, “Oh God!” So was there a part of you, like I remember the feeling of “Wait, can the server handle this right now?”
Cooper: Yes, that was the single biggest concern. We didn’t have much doubt that a lot of people were gonna join. You know, when you get like $10,000 every second for 120 seconds, you’re gonna draw people in. A couple of things happened. One, the app store — both app stores had a little bit of trouble handling the volume, which we didn’t anticipate. Two, mobile carriers can only send out so many text messages per second, and we actually broke that limit. So it was like, people like signing up, so we had to actually add time to the end.
Miserandino: Oh for the text to verify the account limit.
Cooper: Right. So, there were all these things. We had met with AWS, we had met with all these companies to scale up as much as we could. So, it was like, the onboarding of the new people was the friction point, and then once they were in there, we actually handled the scale very eloquently.
Miserandino: You have to think of every possible breaking point.
Cooper: You have to think of them all… We were aware that text was a potential bottleneck, and we flipped the flow, our sign-up flow, so that text was secondary. But all the traffic broke the primary method, so then it reverted back to text. So even though we had thought of it, there was then an unknown thing that happened. The unknown unknowns are tough.
Miserandino: I agree. You can’t predict how the traffic will flow… is it going to be a complete spike? Is it going to be viral? Is it going to be people telling their friends, “Wait, did you do that?” How long did the insanity last?
Cooper: So we had about two months’ worth of our normal sign-ups within a two-minute period. It was highly condensed. It was wild to see the chart spike up that much. We had 1.2 million sign-ups in a two-minute period.
Miserandino: How about this week? Is it still crazy now or is it dying down?
Cooper: It’s been a nice halo so far to the business. My belief on Super Bowl ads for a company like ours is you try to make it so that you’ve won by the time the Super Bowl ad even airs — through the business development. There are all these business development motions, these sales motions that happen. Even employee culture — there’s never been a moment where our employee base has been so rallied around this one thing and enthused and proud of this one thing.
Miserandino: So you have a little bit of homework to do now going forward it sounds like, in terms of, “Did you see the clip?” How far out are you scheduled?
Cooper: Our sales team, our B2B team, they’re fantastic, and they’re taking this message and going to partners and saying, “Hey look, they’re clearly a huge demand for Fetch as a rewards platform. There’s clearly growth that we’re going to continue to achieve.” And the beauty is, we’re a performance layer for those brands in a lot of ways… When they put their offers and their brands onto the Fetch platform, we get paid when those offers get redeemed. So it’s a pretty great story for the sales team to be able to go to these different brands and retailers and restaurants and say, “Hey, our audience is growing. Invest, it’s going to return for your brand in the short term and the long term.” That’s the homework, so to speak, now — going out and telling that story.
Miserandino: I’m wondering when you start to see that effect from a business perspective. They have the assets today, they’re reaching out this week, but you’re not going to see that effect from a business end for weeks, for months, until someone signs the deal?
Cooper: The sales motion is continuous, especially with new partners that haven’t yet advertised on the Fetch platform… We had seen a huge win of revenue boost before the ad even aired, just telling the story of “Hey, we’re going to in the Super Bowl, here’s what we’re doing…” We had this massive spike in users into the platform. Even our current users shopping — we hit revenue highs two days before, one day before, and clearly the day of. And again, revenue for us is when we’re driving results for partners. We were able to capitalize on a lot of that sales and business development motion before the ad even aired.
Miserandino: Do you think you recovered the cost of the entire ad before the ad even ran?
Cooper: We’re confident that we did when we look at the internal numbers… We have an aspect of our app where we reward people for playing mobile games, and if you think about it as like, America’s rewards app, our mission and vision is to reward people for things that they do across a whole spectrum of activities. Shopping is a huge part, gaming is another part of our business, and that gaming business just took off because that’s where we dropped people, it’s what they can engage with in the moment after the livestream. And we saw a huge spike to that business. So we just tried to wrap the business around this event and say like, “Alright, how can we make sure that all these people coming in — that we’re bringing into this experience — that they connect with value immediately?” And then the rest will kind of take care of itself.
Miserandino: Who had the initial spark of the idea to do a Super Bowl ad?
Cooper: At 10 years, Wes our CEO and founder, he decided that once you hit 10 years you get a six-week sabbatical. So I was preparing to go for my 10-year sabbatical in August, and I was about a week out… I woke up, I took a walk one day, came back and I was sitting at my computer, and it came into my mind this thing like, “Hey, what if we did a Super Bowl ad, what could that look like, how could we win?” I kind of thought it through, hammered it out in my head a little bit, it didn’t take long. I called Wes and was like, “Hey, I think we should do a Super Bowl ad.” We talked about the pros and cons and bringing General Mills into the fold, what that could look like, and he was like, “Hey, I love it. Let’s sleep on it, and if we wake up tomorrow and we still think it’s a good idea, we’ll call Doug at General Mills and see if he’s game to explore some way to make this a huge win for both of us.” And so we slept on it, woke up the next day, called Wes, and he was like “Yeah I still think it’s great…” It just started clicking from there, and that was the genesis of it.
Miserandino: You only came up with the idea when someone said, “Stop thinking,” when someone said, “Take that break, you’ve been here 10 years.” You cleared your brain for 14 seconds, and then you went, “Wait a minute, now that I’m offloading all of these projects that were occupying my mind, maybe I should do this.”
For Cooper, the idea came when he let go of everything else, proving that sometimes the best ideas come when you’re not forcing them.
Wrapping up, it’s clear that Fetch’s Super Bowl ad wasn’t just a game changer in terms of sign-ups; it’s a textbook example of how bold marketing moves, backed by strategy and a bit of risk, can pay off big time. Cooper and his team faced unexpected challenges, but they turned those moments into opportunities, driving incredible results both in the short and long term.
For anyone in the marketing world, this story is a solid reminder: Sometimes you have to go all in, trust your team, and let the momentum take over. I’ll be watching closely to see how Fetch keeps the ball rolling after this massive win.
