• by Sarah Mahoney , Staff Writer, 3 hours ago

For most Super Bowl advertisers, the math is brutal but simple: Spend more than $7 million on a national spot and hope your 30 seconds cuts through celebrity cameos, nostalgia plays and meme bait. But for small CPG brands looking to get in on massive Super Bowl audiences, the calculation is harder — and more interesting.

For Procter & Gamble, new solutions come from P&G Ventures, a division created over a decade ago to identify new growth areas. This year, two P&G Ventures brands — Zevo, a flying-insect control brand, and Spruce, a pet-friendly weed killer — are returning to the Super Bowl with regional buys, expanded market coverage, and a growing surround-sound strategy that extends well beyond game day.

The idea, says Jeff Kraft, senior brand director of Zevo, P&G’s first national brand launch in the division in 2017, “is to keep growing, and hopefully become one of P&G’s next billion-dollar brands.”

Both products fit the division’s mandate of offering something fundamentally disruptive in categories that have been pretty dull. For Zevo, that’s nontoxic bug killing, and Spruce, a pet-and-kid-friendly way to kill weeds. But the brands also share a fundamental challenge: more than 90% of U.S. households have never heard of them, let alone tried them. For a niche brand, that makes the Super Bowl — about as mass an audience as imaginable — paradoxically appealing.

Spruce’s creative leans heavily into pets, particularly dogs, building on the insight that many homeowners keep animals indoors when applying traditional herbicides, said Jessi Ettelson, senior brand director at Spruce. Last year’s campaign emphasized that Spruce is safe for use around people, pets and bees. New creative continues to use a rewritten version of “Who Let the Dogs Out” to drive memorability. It portrays dogs not just as beneficiaries but as advocates — even decision-makers — for pet-friendly lawn care, Ettelso said. Raindrop is the agency.

Zevo, meanwhile, is using the Super Bowl to educate viewers about flying insect traps as a category. Its hero product uses blue and UV light and a sticky cartridge to trap and kill insects without chemical insecticides, a notable departure in a category historically defined by sprays. The brand’s Super Bowl spot, using “I need a Zevo,” set to another classic, aims to make that form instantly recognizable and to link Zevo to moments when flying insects are most unwelcome: food, hosting and gatherings. Curiosity is the agency.

Instead of buying national inventory, P&G Ventures is slicing the game into designated market areas, prioritizing regions where pests and weeds are a year-round or early-season concern. Spruce aired ads in 19 markets last year; this year, it’s expanding to 36. Zevo is following a similar playbook, focusing largely on the southern half of the U.S., where winter doesn’t put insect and weed problems on pause.

The Super Bowl ads, though, are just part of the splash, and both brands are backing their regional TV buys with extensive activation. “There are a lot of eyeballs and a lot of excitement,” said Ettelson, “and so we’re looking for delightful and unexpected ways for the consumers to get to know us.”

Kraft says Zevo is partnering with NFL quarterback Trevor Lawrence and his wife, Marissa, including appearances on Radio Row, the media hub leading up to the game, and social content tied to Super Bowl hosting. Spruce is working with college football commentator Kirk Herbstreit, and his dog, Peter, leaning into Radio Row stunts, influencer collaborations and pet-centric visibility.

The Super Bowl spots themselves will air once per market during the game, but the media push doesn’t stop there. In the same regions, both brands are layering in streaming, radio, social and influencer content through February, with Spruce rolling into a broader national media launch in March.

Success won’t be judged overnight. Brand leaders said they’ll look first at reach, impressions and conversion, then track awareness, household penetration and sales over several months as bug and weed seasons ramp up. The Super Bowl, in this model, isn’t the payoff — it’s the starting gun.

In an era when even legacy brands are questioning whether the Super Bowl still works, P&G Ventures is answering a different question: whether the most expensive, mass-reach media moment in advertising can be reshaped to work for brands that most viewers have never heard of — yet.

“We are looking at the ability to break through in an increasingly fragmenting media market and to maximize the return on our investment,” Kraft said. “So while it feels potentially like an oxymoron for small brands to invest in big moments, the amount of attention that you're getting for that investment allows us to drive a level of efficiency and effectiveness. We can really step-change the awareness.”