Direct-to-consumer grooming model Manscaped is about to make its Tremendous Bowl debut, as is Ro, a challenger telehealth startup and, as of 2024, a GLP-1 supplier.
Each additionally share a typical purpose behind their Tremendous Bowl investments, which is to develop their audiences by increasing the notion of their manufacturers past their origin tales and more moderen associations. In different phrases, Manscaped isn’t only for male groin grooming, and Ro isn’t only for weight reduction.
Redefining viewers notion may not sound like a typical efficiency metric in comparison with web site site visitors or on-line gross sales, however outgrowing their best-known niches is essential to their respective progress methods – and it’s why Manscaped and Ro are betting on the Massive Sport this weekend.
Altering model conception is a bushy enterprise
Manscaped’s Tremendous Bowl advert is a part of a broader effort to shed the misperception that it solely sells male groin grooming merchandise, its authentic product line.
“Now now we have extra merchandise that transcend the groin,” mentioned Manscaped CMO Marcelo Kertesz. (You don’t hear that one day by day.) It additionally has shaving and grooming merchandise for the face, hair and different components of the physique.
Manscaped began shifting extra lower-funnel {dollars} into upper-funnel branding budgets final 12 months to construct consciousness.
“We began with a heavy give attention to DTC,” Kertesz mentioned, however the maturity of the model’s retail footprint and the necessity to develop its viewers is “what pushed us to flip our media composition.”
The model is attempting to develop its feminine clientele, for instance. Girls are answerable for roughly three-quarters of shopper purchases within the US, which is why it’s so essential to enchantment to girls.
Manscaped markets its merchandise to girls as a present they will purchase for his or her accomplice or one other man of their life and likewise now labels sure objects as being applicable for all genders. However, arguably, many ladies favor bespoke feminine magnificence merchandise and should not really feel drawn to a reputation like “Manscaped.”
To carry this repositioning to life, Manscaped’s Tremendous Bowl advert showcases animated hairballs lamenting in tune about being shaven from varied components of a person’s physique, together with the chest and between the eyes. The advert additionally exhibits a lady serving to a person shave a hard-to-reach place behind his arm.
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Tipping the scales
However Manscaped isn’t the one model combating an uphill battle to vary mindsets throughout and after the Tremendous Bowl.
Ro is making its first Tremendous Bowl play as a part of a broader effort to be seen as greater than only a supplier of weight-loss medication. Ro really began out as a digital well being clinic for males targeted on treating erectile dysfunction when it launched in 2017 as Roman earlier than rebranding to Ro. It additionally hopes its advert will help handle a number of the stigma and backlash surrounding weight-loss tradition and medicines like GLP-1s.
The corporate desires to be seen as a complete well being care supplier, in response to Will Flaherty, SVP of progress. Whereas Ro does supply separate providers for sexual well being, fertility and skincare, a part of Ro’s messaging is that weight reduction addresses and/or reduces the chance of growing persistent well being points similar to coronary heart illness.
In Ro’s Tremendous Bowl advert, model spokesperson Serena Williams explains why she is more healthy after taking Ro’s merchandise, together with having extra steady blood sugar and improved joint ache.
The purpose isn’t that weight reduction fixes all the things, however quite, in response to Flaherty, it may be a part of a fuller image of well being – one Ro is attempting to spotlight with its broader mixture of choices.
Ro’s give attention to a wider definition of well being is why the model believes that almost all of viewers watching the Massive Sport may gain advantage from GLP-1s.
Metrics or it didn’t occur
Manscaped and Ro, each Tremendous Bowl first-timers, are intent on proving the large funding was value it.
Each manufacturers work with video measurement agency Tatari for TV media planning and attribution. Tatari pitches itself as offering visibility into efficiency throughout video publishers, which will be arduous to seek out in a fragmented media panorama outlined by heated rivalry and walled gardens. With that extra full view, entrepreneurs can gauge marketing campaign efficiency extra precisely and optimize future advert placements.
Nonetheless, it’s essential to notice that efficiency can imply greater than only a sale or a conversion. Model affinity is efficiency, too.
“When you place an advert within the Tremendous Bowl and also you restrict the success of that advert to an outcomes-based metric, you’re actually doing your self a disservice,” mentioned Philip Inghelbrecht, Tatari’s CEO. In the end, he mentioned, TV is about reaching new audiences after which shifting these audiences down the acquisition funnel from consciousness to consideration – the prerequisite to successful extra conversions afterward.
With that definition of efficiency in thoughts, Manscaped and Ro anticipate the Tremendous Bowl to carry them nearer to their enterprise objectives in a means that’s measurable.
For Ro, meaning balancing short-term metrics with longer-term indicators of success.
As quickly because the spot airs, Flaherty mentioned, “we all know we’re going to see a complete lot of site visitors come to our web site.”
“However what we’re actually anticipating and hoping for is to reshape how we’re perceived within the class,” he added.
Within the weeks following the sport, Ro plans to trace branded search exercise and the outcomes of buyer surveys to see whether or not the hoped-for notion shift is taking maintain and the way shoppers view its model in comparison with opponents.
Manscaped is taking the same strategy to monitoring outcomes over time.
For the primary few days after the sport, it would have a look at web site site visitors and gross sales, together with by means of retailers like Amazon. However with regards to ascertaining the causal hyperlink between the 30-second spot and incremental gross sales, Kertesz mentioned, “we’d like till April to begin seeing that influence.”
Shifts in model affinity and popularity will take even longer to measure – a reminder that Tremendous Bowl entrepreneurs are taking part in the lengthy recreation this 12 months and that TV can show itself as a efficiency channel.


