SMARTEST SUPER BOWL PROMO: StockX cameo in Rocket Homes & Mortgage ad with Anna Kendrick & Barbie
This post originally appeared on The Basis Point: SMARTEST SUPER BOWL PROMO: StockX cameo in Rocket Homes & Mortgage ad with Anna Kendrick & Barbie
The Rocket Homes & Rocket Mortgage team came strong with a blink-and-you-miss-it cross promotion in their Super Bowl ad with Anna Kendrick. No, it isn’t the Barbie Dream House cross promo bit complete with realtors, cash buyers, bidding wars — plus He-Man and Skeletor as neighbors! It’s the StockX QR code t-shirt a kid was wearing in the ad.
StockX started as a sneaker exchange backed by Rock Ventures, which is Rocket Mortgage founder Dan Gilbert’s investment mothership. Now StockX is the exchange for all shoes, apparel, and basically any collectible you can think of —- including Mattel toys like Barbie, He-Man, and Skeletor.
See where this is going? Amazon started in books and we know where that went. StockX started with shoes and this ad strategy tells us how big it can get. Also the StockX strategy perfectly positions it to capitalize on the NFT era.
I believe this Rocket Mortgage StockX Super Bowl ad is special not just for its creativity, but because of the depth of the team behind this playbook.
Both StockX and Rocket are part of the same family, and this playbook is a long-game happening at the highest levels of the family.
Jay Farner is on the StockX board, was formerly the CMO of Rocket Mortgage, then served as CEO, and as of January was elevated to head of Rocket Central, which laid out this strategy in their January 2022 announcement:
Rocket Central is the centralized hub for the Rocket Companies fintech platform. Farner will retain his role at Rocket Companies to continue driving the growth of the entire ecosystem from mortgage and real estate to car sales and personal finance.
In his new role at Rocket Central, Farner will drive the vision for the technology, data, product design, marketing, communications and other services the company provides – ensuring there is a consistent, seamless experience for clients across the Rocket Companies ecosystem.
This Super Bowl ad was the first high-budget example of how to bring all the brands together to support each other, and while Farner is perfectly suited to run it, the talent runs deep. Casey Hurbis is a Big Ad exec who came in as Rocket CMO a year after the company launched Rocked Mortgage with a 2016 Super Bowl ad. Back then the company was Quicken Loans and the product was Rocket Mortgage. Casey is who runs the $1 billion annual budget to build the Rocket brand since then. And StockX CMO Deena Bahri is is a Harvard MBA who’s also led huge brands like Helix, Birchbox, Gilt Groupe, and Reebok.
Coinbase definitely deserves a related shout out for smart QR code use in their Super Bowl ad. It was so successful, it crashed their site.
But I wanted to shout out the Rocket Mortgage StockX Super Bowl ad in more detail because it reveals a long game Rocket has been alluding to since their pre-IPO S-1 dropped. Below is the screenshot of the kid wearing the StockX QR code shirt in the ad, and here’s where the StockX QR code takes you. Once there, you can enter to win (only until 2/14/22) a Super Bowl pack with special Nike Jordans and a bunch of Snoop, Dre, Kendrick collectibles.
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Reference:
– VIDEO: StockX cameo in Rocket Homes & Mortgage Super Bowl ad
– January 2022 Rocket news that set up marketing vision
– Will QuickenLoans Just Rebrand To Rocket Mortgage Already?
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