• by Erik Oster , January 18, 2024

As the Super Bowl approaches, brands connected to favorite Game Day foods are coming along for the marketing ride.

Antacid brand Tums is one of those brands, since Super Bowl Sunday can be an especially heartburn-inducing event, between overindulging in foods like wings and pizza and the excitement of the game, Tums Brand Director Amy Sharon told Marketing Daily. So the brand pursued “fun and engaging ways” to connect with younger audiences for what she described as the second-biggest food holiday of the year behind Thanksgiving.

That led to Tums partnering with popular fantasy sports and betting platform DraftKings for a “Prop Bites” campaign inviting audiences to place bets on a variety of food-related questions per the game. The campaign name is a play on the term “prop bets,” which refers to bets placed on occurrences not directly affecting the game’s final outcome.

Sharon said DraftKings’ subscriber base of over 30 million over-indexes with the millennial and Gen Z audience Tums is targeting, providing an opportunity to “bring awareness to the brand in ways that are culturally relevant and modernize the brand.”

Consumers can visit a dedicated DraftKings page launched Tuesday and running up until kickoff on game day to place free prop bets on a series of food-related questions for a chance to win their share of $10,000 in cash prizes.

Questions include "On Game Day, will more people eat spicy guac or mild guac?"

The integrated campaign also features a partnership with comedian Desus Nice, who appears in digital video ads. The campaign, for which the brand revealed it spent seven figures, will also include a paid TikTok promotion, as well as a free-to-play “Tums Prop Bites Casino” event in Las Vegas the Friday before the Super Bowl. Sherman revealed the brand will also have a promotion in partnership with delivery service GoPuff on Super Bowl Sunday.

Developed alongside agency partner Edelman, the campaign was informed by insights from Edelman’s Gen Z Lab, which helped ensure it would reach its core target  of multicultural millennial and Gen Z consumers. Among the insights driving the campaign was the degree to which these younger audiences attend Super Bowl parties more for the food and socializing than the game itself.

“It’s important to break through to a younger audience,” Sharon told Marketing Daily. “It’s about normalizing [heartburn] as a condition that everyone can occasionally suffer from,” she added, and finding “those unique ways to insert the  brand in culturally relevant moments” so that it “becomes identified by Gen Z and millennial audiences as a brand for them.”

Sharon said it was important for the brand to reach a wide, multicultural audience and described Tums as “at its heart a completely inclusive brand.” Asked specifically about the LGBTQ+ market, she conceded that while “the brand’s outreach was intended to reach everyone,” in terms of talent and on-screen representation, that had not been a focus and represented an (unmet) “ongoing opportunity for the brand.”