Downy Releases Its Super Bowl Ad 2 Months Before The Game

Downy waited 11 years to return to the Super Bowl, and they are doing so by releasing their campaign two months before the game.

The P&G brand is making a “loud” return to the Super Bowl with a month-long campaign featuring a mystery celebrity.

Downy’s mainSuper Bowl ad will air during the second quarter but the brand started early, releasing a first 30-second ad as early as two months before the Big Game. And there is a reason for it too: the mystery celebrity is skeptic of Downy’s Unstopables’ 12-week freshness guarantee, so he decided to test it before accepting to reveal who he is.

“What we find is consumers have a hard time believing that Downy Unstopables could actually last as long as the the brand claims that it can last,” said Jenny Maxwell, P&G’s senior brand director of North America Fabric Care. “We thought what better thing to do than launch our Super Bowl ad way ahead of the Super Bowl.”

Downy started its two-month long campaign – and guessing game for who is actually this mystery celebrity – by dropping a 30-second teaser clip of a hoodie-covered celebrity who says he would only uncover his real identity if the long-lasting claim is proven to be true.

“We felt like this strategy added a little intrigue to keep engagement focused on Downy and Unstopables,” Maxwell told Adweek.

The campaign was created with P&G’s Woven Collaborative, a multi-agency collective co-led by executives from WPP’s Grey and Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi.

“The beauty of this campaign is that it goes back to that tension that is created by what the consumer thinks of the product,” said Ciro Sarmiento, chief creative officer of Woven Collaborative. “We have an incredible product with an incredible truth, which is the long-lasting scent. There’s also an incredible tension from the consumer, which is people usually don’t believe in [advertising and marketing] claims.