Procter & Gamble to Seed U.S. South During Super Bowl With Commercial for Pet-Safe Lawn Care
Procter & Gamble hopes it can win the advertising game on Super Bowl Sunday with a real grass-roots effort.
Not everyone in the nation will see the company’s ads for Spruce, a new lawn-care product that P&G says kills weeds and grasses within a a day, while being safe to use around people and pets when used as directed. Those who do view it — audiences in the southern United States — will get a look at something that has proven attractive in years past: animal antics.
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In a 30-second spot slated to run in local ad inventory on 19 Fox affiliates such as WTGS in Savannah, GA, KFTA in Fort Smith, AK, and KTBC in Austin, TX, a plethora of dogs party around a yard with a pool in it, all because Spruce makes it possible. The Baha Men cut a new version of their 2000 hit “Who Let the Dogs Out” to accompany the action.
P&G won’t be paying the more than $7 million that the Fox broadcast network is seeking for a 30-second slot in the national feed of the game, and the company’s money is bound to go a lot further as a result. Hitting southern markets makes strategic sense, says Maris Croswell, CEO of Spruce, because that’s where potential customers will be thinking about the challenge of getting their lawns ready for Spring, since the weather in February will be warmer there. The South is “where weed pressure and weed annoyance is starting to become more top of mind,” she says. The company intends to roll out Spruce ads elsewhere in the nation in months to come, but sees a regional ad that airs during the Super Bowl “as an accelerator,” she says, because people will be in the market for the product, and can talk about their purchase in ways that will get passed along to potential customers in other areas.
The regional strategy has been utilized for years during Super Bowl games by smaller marketers, who would have a tough time paying out the fees for a traditional big-audience spot, or for those who are blocked from appearing in the show due to exclusivity deals. In recent years, however, with the cost of a national Big Game campaign rising significantly, some of Madison Avenue’s top denizens have tested the ploy. Anheuser-Busch InBev has run ads for Busch in local time for a few years, and had said it would put a new Budweiser ad featuring its iconic Clydesdales on local stations before announcing on Monday that the ad would be air nationally during the Big Game. United Airlines and American Family Insurance have also tapped stations in the not-too-distant past.
The cost of airing a spot on the network showing the gridiron spectacular is only one part of a Super Bowl ad’s final price, and often comes with requirements to purchase other commercial inventory. A marketer typically must invest in such elements as celebrity appearances, presence at retail, social-media strategy, special effects in production, and potentially, the licensing of popular music. The local strategy allows an advertiser to focus on specific geographic location where a sale might be more likely.
Figuring out where and when the commercial should appear “is worth just as much” as the creative concept in Spruce’s campaign, says Croswell.
The company enlisted a group of corgis, pugs and sheep doodles for its dancing dog revue — and a canine celebrity. “Bunny” is a sheep dog who is famous on social media and has approximately two million followers on Instagram and around nine million on TikTok. The dog plays a D.J. in the ad and presses buttons that offer voice snippets. She will also be calling attention to Spruce’s debut on her social feeds.
P&G typically vies with rivals such as Unilever, Henkel or Georgia-Pacific, all of which make household products and grooming aids, among other things. Its move into lawn care could have it competing with a wide variety of new players. The global market for lawn care products is projected to reach nearly $68.7 billion by 2023, according to a report from Next Move Strategy Consulting, spurred by new interest in gardening, more focus on developing green spaces in urban areas and an increased awareness of environmental issues.
P&G hasn’t made a big announcement about its move into the category, and Croswell notes Spruce marks the company’s “first foray” into it. “We’re exploring a lot of different possibilities within the herbicide category, and eventually lawn and garden, but for right now this is the first step,” she says. “We really believe that the lawn and garden category is an incredibly important one for consumers, and we think that we can take our deep consumer understanding and delight more consumers in the house and out of the house.”
As the new ad suggests, Procter will have to bark to get the right consumers to bite.
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