When Super Bowl LIX airs Sunday on Fox from New Orleans, more than 100 million viewers are expected to watch the Kansas City Chiefs vie for an unprecedented three-peat when they take on the Philadelphia Eagles.
But an unlikely Chicago team is on an equally remarkable Super Bowl run, as WeatherTech, a once-obscure Bolingbrook car floor mat manufacturer, and Pinnacle Advertising, a small Schaumburg agency, roll out their 13th Super Bowl commercial since 2014.
That WeatherTech is still going head-to-head with some of the biggest brands in the world – a true David and Goliath marketing story – has defied skeptics and arguably changed the game of Super Bowl advertising.
“It’s really been astonishing,” said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who heads up an annual Super Bowl advertising review. “I keep thinking it will be their last year. They keep showing up.”
In 2014, WeatherTech founder David MacNeil had the audacity to blow a large chunk of his marketing budget on his first Super Bowl spot, paying $4 million for the airtime to compete on TV’s biggest advertising stage. Employing the creative chops of little-known northwest suburban ad agency Pinnacle made WeatherTech even more of a longshot to succeed.
Despite the naysayers, WeatherTech has become a Super Bowl mainstay over the years, joining the likes of Budweiser, Doritos and T-Mobile. In the process, the privately owned company has grown exponentially, with annual sales in the “high nine figures” and a ubiquitous year-round advertising presence.
“It’s truly elevated their brand,” said Michael Magnusson, founder and CEO of Pinnacle Advertising.
After a brief semi-hiatus – WeatherTech opted for a less expensive pre-game spot last year – the plucky southwest suburban company is back in the Big Game with a second-quarter commercial that cost a reported $7 million for the airtime.
The new spot, which has been released in advance online, is a radical departure from WeatherTech’s consistent Made in America messaging, shifting to a carload of seventy-something women raising hell on the open road while keeping the interior pristine, thanks to the floor mats.
“This might be their best spot so far,” said Calkins.
The Super Bowl remains the most expensive and most watched TV event of the year. A record 123.7 million viewers tuned into the Super Bowl last year on CBS to see Kansas City beat San Francisco 25-22 in a memorable overtime contest from Las Vegas.
Advertising for this year’s broadcast was selling for a reported $7 million per spot in May, when WeatherTech and Pinnacle booked the air time. The price has now climbed to a record $8 million per spot for a handful of last-second advertisers.
Founded in 1989 by MacNeil, WeatherTech makes custom vehicle floor mats, which it sells directly to consumers and to automobile manufacturers. Over the years it has expanded into everything from dog feeding systems and car phone holders to a brief foray into face shields during the pandemic. The company has more than 1,500 workers on its sprawling Bolingbrook campus, where its products are made.
WeatherTech’s core marketing strategy has long been in the hands of a Pinnacle, a Schaumburg agency founded in 1998 by Magnusson, a former Chicago Tribune ad salesman.
Started as a small auto industry-focused shop, Pinnacle made a name for itself with the first WeatherTech Super Bowl spot more than a decade ago. It has since grown to more than 100 employees, more than 100 clients across multiple industries and more than $250 million in annual billings, with satellite locations in Scottsdale and San Francisco.
The agency also survived a trademark infringement lawsuit with an unrelated Pinnacle Advertising of Florida, whose existence came to light when trade publication Ad Age mistakenly linked to the wrong Pinnacle in an article about Super Bowl advertisers in January 2015, and then repeated the mistake again in January 2016.
The Florida agency has since gone out of business, Magnusson said.
While declining to disclose the annual spend, Magnusson said WeatherTech remains Pinnacle’s largest client, and that the company’s advertising budget has grown “in tandem” with its annual revenue since taking the initial Super Bowl plunge.
WeatherTech’s high-profile Super Bowl run has also been a magnet for attracting new advertising business to Pinnacle, Magnusson said.
“We have many clients that are with us now because of the work that we’ve done with WeatherTech,” Magnusson said.
For WeatherTech, the impetus to return to the Big Game was catalyzed by a creative idea about older women going wild, which was developed by one of Pinnacle’s art directors and pitched to MacNeil last spring, Magnusson said.
MacNeil loved the concept from the get-go, Magnusson said, and even came up with the idea for the song that drives the spot, “Born to Be Wild,” the 1968 classic by Steppenwolf that became the defining theme of the iconic “Easy Rider” movie soundtrack.
Pinnacle booked Grammy-winning music video director Joseph Kahn, who has worked with Taylor Swift and Eminem, to helm the commercial, which was shot in mid-November in Pacific Palisades, Playa Del Rey and Malibu, California, before the devastating wildfires.
In the spot, a posse of silver-haired women in a 1963 Lincoln Continental convertible pop “Born to Be Wild” in the eight-track player and head out on the coastal highway, looking for adventure.
They find plenty of it, spray-painting a moving tractor-trailer, doing donuts through an oncoming motorcycle gang, breakdancing at the beach, flashing to celebrate a Bingo victory and culminating with a “Thelma and Louise”-style leap that spills their tea and cookies on the floor mats.
“Don’t worry girls, I’ve got WeatherTech,” the driver reassures her passengers.
The adventure ends with mug shots after a motorcycle cop catches the cruising seventy-somethings speeding and a judge brings the gavel down.
Previous WeatherTech spots have generally not scored at the top of the post-game Super Bowl polls that have turned commercials into a separate competition among viewers and industry experts. Calkins expects the new spot, dubbed “Whatever Comes Your Way,” to do better.
Unlike most WeatherTech spots, which focus on the Made in America backstory and the functionality of the floor mats, the new commercial, like its leading ladies, takes some risks to convey a “higher-order benefit” and break through the clutter of the competitive Super Bowl stage, Calkins said.
“Here you can see people having a crazy life, and they’re doing that partly because they’re not worried about messing up the car, because they’ve got WeatherTech,” Calkins said.
Taking a WeatherTech ad where no WeatherTech ad has gone before has also been fun and energizing for Pinnacle, allowing the agency to “stretch its creative legs,” Magnusson said.
While the spot features seniors, Magnusson said it should connect with a broader demographic.
“It takes these older women and positions them as being badasses who are just out for fun,” he said. “I think it’s going to resonate a lot with the younger generation.”
How it ultimately plays out will be decided on Sunday, along with a football game between the Eagles and the Chiefs.
rchannick@chicagotribune.com
