Tubi CMO Nicole Parlapiano shares how her team prepared to livestream the Super Bowl

Nicole Parlapiano, the CMO at Tubi, talks about livestreaming the Super Bowl and how the marketing team prepared for the event.

Transcript

00:00This is a moment that your brand can live or die and you're really forced to figure out who your

00:06brand is in good and bad. So the Super Bowl was an incredible moment for the 2B business and to be

00:20honest I think especially as a challenger brand we really felt like this was an opportunity to

00:26take us to the big leagues. That was not met without a lot of anxiety. I will not forget the first time I

00:33heard that we'd be streaming the Super Bowl live and I as a CMO was extremely honestly nervous.

00:41There's obviously it's a lot of product and technical work to make sure that we can handle

00:47a live stream like that. We do not live stream sports regularly so that was a concern. We didn't

00:53have a lot of experience doing something like this. So I think in terms of how we prepared we had

01:01you know a very tight go-to-market plan. We thought of all the channels. We thought of the optimal

01:06way to roll things out. You find in these moments that you have to be extremely nimble. A lot of the

01:13things that we had planned just didn't come to fruition whether it be creative approvals or timing

01:20on things. So the team and I just had to weeks before kind of recalibrate our plans and figure

01:27out how we were going to make people aware that we had the Super Bowl for free and given we were

01:33really looking to do something different for Super Bowl and attract a very casual sports fan. People

01:39that wouldn't didn't watch NFL all season more that were there for the cultural moment of it all and

01:45making that accessible. That was our whole strategy. So when we ran into some creative barriers

01:51three weeks before I ended up just taking my most of my budget and giving it to creators

01:56to talk about the Super Bowl on 2B and that's ultimately how we launched and in those moments

02:03it's not like a campaign where you have time to kind of calibrate and respond. This is a few hours of

02:10which something can go wrong. There's different levels of which can go wrong. It can be you know

02:16we had a plan for if there's a delay. We had a plan for if you know two devices were down but not all 12

02:22devices. We had a plan for a complete crash out and then a crash out that exceeded five minutes. There

02:28was all these different kind of scenarios we were planning for and that was really close partnership with

02:35the product and tech teams and we would literally do simulated army drills for like all of a sudden

02:41something happens and you know Taylor Swift is tweeting that she can't get the game to watch her

02:47boyfriend. What are we going to do? And so literally that is what we were doing and seeing how the teams

02:54kind of responded and we iterated on the plans. You know I think you have to figure out what's right

03:01and what's not right in that moment and we feel like we're the brand that is more of the people's

03:07streamer so if the stream was to go down we don't want to hide from it. We don't want to just post

03:14about our Super Bowl ad campaign and ignore that the stream could be down. We had a plan to make sure

03:21people had a way to watch the Super Bowl somewhere so we were going to direct them either to NFL or to Fox

03:27to make sure that if they wanted to finish watching the game and be apologetic and give them the avenues

03:33to do so. It really I think forces you to think about who are you in those moments and there are

03:39moments that either can even if something bad was to happen with the stream there is a way to still

03:46win in that moment. It's not all loss but it takes effort and time to think about how you do that.

03:52Thankfully nothing went wrong. It was a record-breaking streaming sporting event. It was record-breaking

04:00viewership for the Super Bowl overall and a lot of that had to do with the type of audience that

04:05Tubi was able to bring to the table that was incremental to most Super Bowls.