Direct-to-consumer grooming brand Manscaped is about to make its Super Bowl debut, as is Ro, a challenger telehealth startup and, as of 2024, a GLP-1 provider.
Both also share a common goal behind their Super Bowl investments, which is to grow their audiences by expanding the perception of their brands beyond their origin stories and more recent associations. In other words, Manscaped isn’t just for male groin grooming, and Ro isn’t just for weight loss.
Redefining audience perception might not sound like a typical performance metric compared to site traffic or online sales, but outgrowing their best-known niches is key to their respective growth strategies – and it’s why Manscaped and Ro are betting on the Big Game this weekend.
Changing brand conception is a hairy business
Manscaped’s Super Bowl ad is part of a broader effort to shed the misconception that it only sells male groin grooming products, its original product line.
“Now we have more products that go beyond the groin,” said Manscaped CMO Marcelo Kertesz. (You don’t hear that one every day.) It also has shaving and grooming products for the face, hair and other parts of the body.
Manscaped started shifting more lower-funnel dollars into upper-funnel branding budgets last year to build awareness.
“We started with a heavy focus on DTC,” Kertesz said, but the maturity of the brand’s retail footprint and the need to grow its audience is “what pushed us to flip our media composition.”
The brand is trying to expand its female clientele, for example. Women are responsible for roughly three-quarters of consumer purchases in the US, which is why it’s so important to appeal to women.
Manscaped markets its products to women as a gift they can buy for their partner or another man in their life and also now labels certain items as being appropriate for all genders. But, arguably, many women prefer bespoke female beauty products and may not feel drawn to a name like “Manscaped.”
To bring this repositioning to life, Manscaped’s Super Bowl ad showcases animated hairballs lamenting in song about being shaven from various parts of a man’s body, including the chest and between the eyes. The ad also shows a woman helping a man shave a hard-to-reach place behind his arm.
Tipping the scales
But Manscaped isn’t the only brand fighting an uphill battle to change mindsets during and after the Super Bowl.
Ro is making its first Super Bowl play as part of a broader effort to be seen as more than just a provider of weight-loss drugs. Ro actually started out as a digital health clinic for men focused on treating erectile dysfunction when it launched in 2017 as Roman before rebranding to Ro. It also hopes its ad can help address some of the stigma and backlash surrounding weight-loss culture and drugs like GLP-1s.
The company wants to be seen as a comprehensive health care provider, according to Will Flaherty, SVP of growth. While Ro does offer separate services for sexual health, fertility and skin care, part of Ro’s messaging is that weight loss addresses and/or reduces the risk of developing chronic health issues such as heart disease.
In Ro’s Super Bowl ad, brand spokesperson Serena Williams explains why she is healthier after taking Ro’s products, including having more stable blood sugar and improved joint pain.
The point isn’t that weight loss fixes everything, but rather, according to Flaherty, it can be part of a fuller picture of health – one Ro is trying to highlight with its broader mix of offerings.
Ro’s focus on a wider definition of health is why the brand believes that the majority of viewers watching the Big Game could benefit from GLP-1s.
Metrics or it didn’t happen
Manscaped and Ro, both Super Bowl first-timers, are intent on proving the massive investment was worth it.
Both brands work with video measurement firm Tatari for TV media planning and attribution. Tatari pitches itself as providing visibility into performance across video publishers, which can be hard to find in a fragmented media landscape defined by heated rivalry and walled gardens. With that more complete view, marketers can gauge campaign performance more accurately and optimize future ad placements.
Still, it’s important to note that performance can mean more than just a sale or a conversion. Brand affinity is performance, too.
“If you place an ad in the Super Bowl and you limit the success of that ad to an outcomes-based metric, you’re really doing yourself a disservice,” said Philip Inghelbrecht, Tatari’s CEO. Ultimately, he said, TV is about reaching new audiences and then moving those audiences down the purchase funnel from awareness to consideration – the prerequisite to winning more conversions later on.
With that definition of performance in mind, Manscaped and Ro expect the Super Bowl to bring them closer to their business goals in a way that’s measurable.
For Ro, that means balancing short-term metrics with longer-term indicators of success.
As soon as the spot airs, Flaherty said, “we know we’re going to see a whole lot of traffic come to our site.”
“But what we are really expecting and hoping for is to reshape how we’re perceived in the category,” he added.
In the weeks following the game, Ro plans to track branded search activity and the results of customer surveys to see whether the hoped-for perception shift is taking hold and how consumers view its brand compared to competitors.
Manscaped is taking a similar approach to tracking outcomes over time.
For the first few days after the game, it will look at site traffic and sales, including through retailers like Amazon. But when it comes to ascertaining the causal link between the 30-second spot and incremental sales, Kertesz said, “we need until April to start seeing that impact.”
Shifts in brand affinity and reputation will take even longer to measure – a reminder that Super Bowl marketers are playing the long game this year and that TV can prove itself as a performance channel.
