• by Mallory Russell , January 15, 2015

No, there is nothing new about the brand ambush – capitalizing on an event without paying for TV time or sponsorship.

Nike has built a reputation (and a strategy) as an ambush advertiser during both the Olympics and the World Cup.  In 2010, it stole competitor Adidas’ thunder during the World Cup with “Write the Future,” which now has 46.9 million views. During the 2012 Olympics, the brand skirted the Olympics with “Find Your Greatness,” wihich generated 15.8 million views. And just this summer, Nike again out-shown the World Cup’s official sponsor, Adidas, with two campaigns – “Risk Everything” and “The Last Game” – both of which have been viewed more than 100 million times.

Nike’s ambush creative never fails to drive viewership, buzz, and media coverage. Why? The brand tells a great story in an artful way. Even more important, the spirit of its creative always matches the tone and spirit of the event it is ambushing.

The same cannot be said for most brands that try to ambush events, especially during the Super Bowl, when campaigns are generally artless and overplayed. We know the most common ambush tactic well by now: a brand says they were going to run a spot during the game, but their creative was too controversial and, thus, banned. Of course, most of these brands never intended to run the spot they created, which is usually evident by the absurd and poorly produced spot that they release online after its banishment.

Last year, Heineken’s Newcastle Brown Ale showed us all what a proper Super Bowl ambush might look like with “If We Made It.” The beer brand ran teaser ads leading up to the game that promoted an over-the-top Super Bowl campaign filled with explosions, sharks, and Anna Kendrick, among other things. The punch line was that no such campaign existed. The brand spent around $1 million to produce “If We Made It,” equivalent to a fourth the cost of an in-game spot. The campaign garnered more than 10 million views and drove a huge amount of media coverage for the brand, most than most Super Bowl advertisers.

While the old banned spot stunt had gone stale, this humorous campaign – which poked fun at the fact that the brand didn’t have money for a Super Bowl ad – was a completely fresh take on the Super Bowl ambush. But the campaign also worked because of how it was promoted. A fully digital campaign, “If We Made It” was released online weeks before the game, when it could fully capitalize on the mania that has developed around ads in the lead up to the game.

This year, Newcastle continues to impress with a fresh batch of digital campaigns that insert the brand into the Super Bowl conversation. The first, “(UN)OFFICIAL SNACK CHIP CONTEST SUBMISSION," is a video that purports to be an entrance into Doritos’ long-running Crash the Super Bowl contest. In the low-budget, and silly video, the chip bag is blurred out so that the only logo that’s seen is Newcastle’s logo.

The second stars Aubrey Plaza of “Parks and Recreation.” In “Newcastle’s Call for Brands,” Plaza introduces the brand’s latest “bright” idea: getting small brands to go in on a Super Bowl spot together. Brands who want to share a :30 with dozens of others  can go to NewcastleBandOfBrands.com for more information.

Both campaigns have drawn huge amounts of media attention, and views are sure to follow. Now the question is, why aren’t other brands joining in on the ambush action?