{"id":14759,"date":"2025-02-16T03:06:43","date_gmt":"2025-02-16T03:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/how-fetchs-super-bowl-ad-caused-a-1-2m-sign-up-surge-in-2-minutes\/"},"modified":"2025-02-16T03:06:43","modified_gmt":"2025-02-16T03:06:43","slug":"how-fetchs-super-bowl-ad-caused-a-1-2m-sign-up-surge-in-2-minutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/how-fetchs-super-bowl-ad-caused-a-1-2m-sign-up-surge-in-2-minutes\/","title":{"rendered":"How Fetch\u2019s Super Bowl Ad Caused a 1.2M Sign-Up Surge in 2 Minutes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <p><a href=\"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/online-workshops-list\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-496\" src=\"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/RETAIL-ONLINE-TRAINING-728-X-90.png\" alt=\"Retail Online Training\" width=\"729\" height=\"91\" srcset=\"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/RETAIL-ONLINE-TRAINING-728-X-90.png 729w, https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/RETAIL-ONLINE-TRAINING-728-X-90-300x37.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 729px) 100vw, 729px\" \/><\/a><\/p><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cI 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.\u201d <\/em>\u2014 Birk Cooper, CMO of Fetch<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>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\u2019s debut Super Bowl ad led to a game-changing <strong>1.2 million sign-ups in just two minutes.<\/strong> It was fascinating to hear how they navigated tech hurdles and seized the moment, turning a bold idea into a huge business win.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<p> <iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Fetch | The Big Reward Ad\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-vmJfJVRyA0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> So, is this the craziest week of your life right now?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> Craziest four months\u2026 Yeah, it was wild. Making an ad isn\u2019t specifically difficult \u2014 like it\u2019s difficult to make great advertising, but making an ad, right, like it\u2019s a known thing. This is a whole different thing because we were building the livestream, which we had never done before.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> 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\u2019t know, but it\u2019s a rewards platform. So, we\u2019re America\u2019s 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\u2019ll get points. If you play mobile games, you\u2019ll get points. So, it\u2019s 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\u2019re like, \u201cAlright, let\u2019s bring our value prop through to the Super Bowl.\u201d And so we built out the livestream capability to give people money live during that event.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> So, when did you realize, \u201cOh wow, this is going big\u201d? Because it feels like it went big, but I don\u2019t know when you realized it went big.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> I recall that, I remember when I was CEO of Inquisitor at the time and we watched when a famous death occurred, and we\u2019re watching the analytics in the server load start to break down, going, \u201cOh God!\u201d So was there a part of you, like I remember the feeling of \u201cWait, can the server handle this right now?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> Yes, that was the single biggest concern. We didn\u2019t 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\u2019re gonna draw people in. A couple of things happened. One, the app store \u2014 both app stores had a little bit of trouble handling the volume, which we didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> Oh for the text to verify the account limit.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> You have to think of every possible breaking point.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> You have to think of them all\u2026 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> I agree. You can\u2019t predict how the traffic will flow\u2026 is it going to be a complete spike? Is it going to be viral? Is it going to be people telling their friends, \u201cWait, did you do that?\u201d How long did the insanity last?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> So we had about two months\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> How about this week? Is it still crazy now or is it dying down?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> It\u2019s 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\u2019ve won by the time the Super Bowl ad even airs \u2014 through the business development. There are all these business development motions, these sales motions that happen. Even employee culture \u2014 there\u2019s never been a moment where our employee base has been so rallied around this one thing and enthused and proud of this one thing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino: <\/strong>So you have a little bit of homework to do now going forward it sounds like, in terms of, \u201cDid you see the clip?\u201d How far out are you scheduled?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> Our sales team, our B2B team, they\u2019re fantastic, and they\u2019re taking this message and going to partners and saying, \u201cHey look, they\u2019re clearly a huge demand for Fetch as a rewards platform. There\u2019s clearly growth that we\u2019re going to continue to achieve.\u201d And the beauty is, we\u2019re a performance layer for those brands in a lot of ways\u2026 When they put their offers and their brands onto the Fetch platform, we get paid when those offers get redeemed. So it\u2019s a pretty great story for the sales team to be able to go to these different brands and retailers and restaurants and say, \u201cHey, our audience is growing. Invest, it\u2019s going to return for your brand in the short term and the long term.\u201d That\u2019s the homework, so to speak, now \u2014 going out and telling that story.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> I\u2019m wondering when you start to see that effect from a business perspective. They have the assets today, they\u2019re reaching out this week, but you\u2019re not going to see that effect from a business end for weeks, for months, until someone signs the deal?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> The sales motion is continuous, especially with new partners that haven\u2019t yet advertised on the Fetch platform\u2026 We had seen a huge win of revenue boost before the ad even aired, just telling the story of \u201cHey, we\u2019re going to in the Super Bowl, here\u2019s what we\u2019re doing\u2026\u201d We had this massive spike in users into the platform. Even our current users shopping \u2014 we hit revenue highs two days before, one day before, and clearly the day of. And again, revenue for us is when we\u2019re driving results for partners. We were able to capitalize on a lot of that sales and business development motion before the ad even aired.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> Do you think you recovered the cost of the entire ad before the ad even ran?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> We\u2019re confident that we did when we look at the internal numbers\u2026 We have an aspect of our app where we reward people for playing mobile games, and if you think about it as like, America\u2019s 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\u2019s where we dropped people, it\u2019s 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, \u201cAlright, how can we make sure that all these people coming in \u2014 that we\u2019re bringing into this experience \u2014 that they connect with value immediately?\u201d And then the rest will kind of take care of itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino:<\/strong> Who had the initial spark of the idea to do a Super Bowl ad?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cooper:<\/strong> 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\u2026 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, \u201cHey, what if we did a Super Bowl ad, what could that look like, how could we win?\u201d I kind of thought it through, hammered it out in my head a little bit, it didn\u2019t take long. I called Wes and was like, \u201cHey, I think we should do a Super Bowl ad.\u201d We talked about the pros and cons and bringing General Mills into the fold, what that could look like, and he was like, \u201cHey, I love it. Let\u2019s sleep on it, and if we wake up tomorrow and we still think it\u2019s a good idea, we\u2019ll call Doug at General Mills and see if he\u2019s game to explore some way to make this a huge win for both of us.\u201d And so we slept on it, woke up the next day, called Wes, and he was like \u201cYeah I still think it\u2019s great\u2026\u201d It just started clicking from there, and that was the genesis of it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Miserandino: <\/strong>You only came up with the idea when someone said, \u201cStop thinking,\u201d when someone said, \u201cTake that break, you\u2019ve been here 10 years.\u201d You cleared your brain for 14 seconds, and then you went, \u201cWait a minute, now that I\u2019m offloading all of these projects that were occupying my mind, maybe I should do this.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For Cooper, the idea came when he let go of everything else, proving that sometimes the best ideas come when you\u2019re not forcing them.<\/p>\n<p>Wrapping up, it\u2019s clear that Fetch\u2019s Super Bowl ad wasn\u2019t just a game changer in terms of sign-ups; it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>For anyone in the marketing world, this story is a solid reminder: Sometimes you have to <strong>go all in<\/strong>, trust your team, and let the momentum take over. I\u2019ll be watching closely to see how Fetch keeps the ball rolling after this massive win.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><p><a href=\"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/online-workshops-list\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-496\" src=\"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/RETAIL-ONLINE-TRAINING-728-X-90.png\" alt=\"Retail Online Training\" width=\"729\" height=\"91\" srcset=\"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/RETAIL-ONLINE-TRAINING-728-X-90.png 729w, https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/RETAIL-ONLINE-TRAINING-728-X-90-300x37.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 729px) 100vw, 729px\" \/><\/a><\/p><br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI was in the mission control room, watching the numbers just spike as soon as the ad aired, and it was just like a vertical [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}