Media events at Super Bowls aren't usually meant to put you to sleep. But Sleep Number Corp.'s goal at the annual clash of gridiron gladiators in 2022 was to sell the idea that its products were ZzzQuil in mattress form. "Our biggest challenge was developing a campaign bold enough to break through the noise leading into and during the Super Bowl," says Julie Elepano, senior director of public-relations marketing for the Minneapolis-based company.

And what a ruckus it was. The 68 major commercials that aired during the game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals played in Los Angeles' SoFi Stadium were meant to intercept our attention spans. But with ingenious ads such as plastic supermodel Barbie landing her dream house with the help of Rocket Mortgage LLC or "Schitt's Creek" schlepy star Eugene Levy transforming into a Fabio-haired Marvel superhero in an ad promoting Nissan, cutting through media clutter on that scale would be harder than pulling out a victory when you're down two touchdowns, with 10 seconds left on the game clock.

Why even bother competing when heavy hitters like those are sucking up all the oxygen? Because, despite its acute cost and severe competition, the Super Bowl is unparalleled for its almost supernatural ability to skyrocket product sales and brand awareness among the 200 million who watch it worldwide. But that pot of gold comes with a caveat many companies prefer to ignore. "Brands that don't get it see the Super Bowl as 'Field of Dreams' marketing: 'If you build it, they will come,'" says David Sutton, an authority on transformational marketing and author of "Marketing Interrupted: Sometimes the Only Way to Succeed Is to Go a Little Crazy." "Super Bowl ads can't just be a one-off event; they should be part of a sophisticated, high-level strategy."

You Sleep What You Sow
When it came to an actual Super Bowl strategy, Sleep Number wasn't exactly a peewee team lining up against a roster of grizzled NFL Hall of Famers. With Twin Cities-based exhibit house CenterPoint Marketing Inc. in its backfield, Sleep Number has methodically evolved a master plan of building a roster of events designed to generate megawatts of attention and exposure during Super Bowl week. Beginning in 2018, it entered into a multi-year partnership with the National Football League whereby every active player is offered one of the company's Sleep Number 360 smart beds, whose biometric sensors monitor your time spent in bed, heart rate, respiration, and other metrics to produce a personalized SleepIQ score that evaluates your quality of sleep on a scale of zero to 100. If that was a marketing first down, its other move that year was a touchdown: a pre- Super Bowl event where the company staged the biggest virtual-reality (VR) football game ever held in Minneapolis before the showdown between the Patriots and the Eagles.

For the 2019 Super Bowl at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Sleep Number and CenterPoint constructed a 60-by-60-foot exhibit within Georgia World Congress Center, as part of the NFL's Super Bowl Experience. Arguably Sleep Number's main attraction was a Dream Team Virtual Bedroom, which employed on-site projection mapping, allowing visitors to see the official NFL logo, team mascot, and colors for their favorite team superimposed onto specific areas on the room. This became a singular photo opportunity that generated a whopping 157 million media impressions, scored attention in eight high-profile media outlets, such as Sports Illustrated and USA Today, and collected lead information on 5,000 prospective mattress buyers. On the heels of that impressive success – and resisting what had to be an understandable urge to stick with tried-and-true plays that had scored so well with media and the public – Sleep Number upped its game yet again. For the 2020 and 2021 game of games, it built a 20-by-30-foot space during the Super Bowl week in the host city that served as a backdrop to podcasts, panel discussions, and interviews with sport celebs, such as Dak Prescott, the Dallas Cowboys star QB.

Toss And Turn
Just as it continually adapted its playbook, Sleep Number planned to rush beyond the sedentary confines of the studio for Super Bowl LVI in 2022. The brand huddled together and called plays intended to build on the successes of its previous Super Bowl victories. Sleep Number's game plan again encompassed a studio space – this time at the Super Bowl LVI Media Center at the Los Angeles Convention Center – only changing its laminate color from gloss black to gloss white and adding a handful of new custom structural components. "We decided to refresh the existing structure Sleep Number built for a previous trade show," says Greg Friedmann, a senior account manager at CenterPoint. "It made perfect sense – utilizing the structure met all the project objectives and helped keep it within budget." The studio would function as the ground control throughout the Super Bowl, where Sleep Number could conduct panel discussions, host third-party podcasts, and brief various other media on the necessity of a good night's rest on human performance.
Stretching beyond the confines of the playing field, so to speak, Sleep Number partnered with the Los Angeles Times to promote its content that the newspaper would amplify to its more than 40 million unique monthly latimes.com visitors. Lastly, it planned a variety of activations in Los Angeles with branded in-store collateral that again, would bang the drum of sleep's importance to mental and physical wellness.

The goal for any team in any kind of athletic contest is to win. But how is that victory measured? In the NFL, it's how many points you score. In corporate events, the yardstick is how well you meet your goals. For Sleep Number, the company's main objective was stark as a win or a loss: generate 400 million earned media impressions.

Rise and Shine
While the official kickoff for the two teams in Super Bowl LVI was 6:30 p.m. EST, on February 13, 2022, Sleep Number took the field early. Beginning several days before the game, the company commenced its media blitz. Its all-star roster included a number of high-profile athletes, trainers, and, not surprisingly, sleep experts. The athletes alone comprised a group whose names possessed enormous cachet and instant recognition to anyone familiar with the NFL: Brandon Marshall, Todd Gurley, Robert Woods, and Justin Jefferson, among others. Not incidentally, their Instagram and Twitter followers collectively ran into the millions.

The company allowed a total of nine podcasts – including One Shot and The NFL Players Podcast – to work from its space free of charge. Aided by supplied briefing materials, the players and the various podcast hosts wove the brand's health and wellness discussion about the benefits of quality sleep into their interviews. Similarly, Dr. Peter Polos, a well-known associate professor of sleep medicine and Sleep Number's resident expert on the topic, appeared on several podcasts. Moreover, Polos conducted a number of one-on-one consultations with the players regarding their performance and the quality of their sleep. Throughout the entire week leading up to the do-or-die spectacle of athleticism and ceremony, other well-known media such as Fansided, CBS Sports Radio, The Ringer, SB Nation Podcast, NBC Sports EDGE, USA Today, and the Dan LeBetard Show interviewed the players Sleep Number brought in via in-studio or virtual broadcasts. The message, loud as a halftime show, was that, as Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Dekker put it, "Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together."

If there was a fourth and final quarter to the company's media event, it crackled with as much coiled energy as its first. The company's ancillary activations included in-store placements that magnified its presence during Super Bowl week and increased the relentless blitz of messaging about the benefits of a good night's sleep. Sleep Number covered the windows in four of its stores in the Los Angeles market with game-related graphics as well as placed a Super Bowl cling across 25 more of its L.A.-area stores.

Moreover, it utilized a quirky commercial starring the Hall of Famer running back Eric Dickerson, who was glimpsed running cross-country from New York to the City of Angels. Along the way, he reveals the secret behind his galloping energy: the Sleep Number 360 smart bed. The ad played in 537 stores nationally and online. Capping the in-store activations, the Super Bowl/Sleep Number logo lockup (whereby the logo was juxtaposed right next to the NFL's) featured in-video players placed across 150 other stores.

When the time came to evaluate Sleep Number's media event, Corporate Event Awards judges did anything but doze off. "It's undoubtedly difficult to obtain a significant share of voice in the Super Bowl," said one judge, "but this event drove home the messaging of how sleep truly does affect performance, no matter if you're a star athlete or an armchair quarterback."

Slumber Party
Even if you appraised Sleep Number with the cold eye of a gruff Bill Belichick evaluating a rookie, the company won in a blowout by scoring 574.2 million earned media impressions – 43-percent rush past its goal. Additional metrics burnished Sleep Number's performance even more. The alliance with the Los Angeles Times paid off handsomely with 2.28 million media impressions, 55 percent above what it expected. Media briefings escalated nearly 50 percent, from 34 in 2021 to 50, while the Eric Dickerson content generated an additional 60 million impressions. With a game plan even a Monday-morning quarterback wouldn't second guess, Sleep Number scored touchdown after touchdown, extending a Super Bowl streak any NFL team would envy. E