Every February, the marketing world obsesses over Super Bowl advertising. Which spots will break through? Which brands will waste their $8 million on forgettable celebrity cameos? Which creative risks will pay off?
For Australian marketers, this obsession can feel academic. We don't have a single cultural moment that commands 126 million simultaneous viewers. We don't have the budget for a 30-second spot that costs more than many annual marketing budgets.
But here's what we do have: the AFL Grand Final, which reached 6.24 million Australians in 2024. The NRL Grand Final. State of Origin. Brownlow Medal night. Gather Round. These are our tentpole moments, and they offer the same fundamental opportunity as the Super Bowl: a concentrated window where brands can build fame that persists long after the final siren.
The question isn't whether we can afford Super Bowl-style advertising. The question is whether we can measure fame effects with Super Bowl-level rigour and translate those insights into commercial outcomes.
The answer is yes, and it doesn't require $10 million. It requires a 72-hour measurement sprint.
Fame is not the same as awareness. Awareness means people know your brand exists. Fame means your brand occupies mental real estate, it comes to mind fluently in buying situations, it carries emotional and cultural associations that influence choice.
Research consistently shows that fame-building advertising is the most effective at driving commercial outcomes. Binet and Field's effectiveness research found that fame campaigns, those that get people talking and sharing, deliver the highest impact on market share and profitability. Fame creates memory structures that persist and compound over time.
Big cultural moments accelerate fame-building because they concentrate attention. When millions of people are watching the same event, talking about the same moments, and sharing the same second-screen experience, brands that show up effectively can compress months of mental availability building into hours.
But here's the challenge: fame effects are often treated as unmeasurable, as something you feel rather than something you quantify. That's a mistake. Fame is measurable. You just need to measure the right signals in the right window.
Super Bowl advertisers have become sophisticated at measuring fame effects in real time. The best brands track four categories of signals that distinguish genuine fame from vanity metrics.
When advertising genuinely creates fame, people search for your brand. Research from Google found that TV advertising can boost branded search queries by up to 20% within hours of airing. Thinkbox research in the UK found that TV generates the strongest multiplier effect on search of any medium.
Branded search lift is one of the most reliable signals of advertising impact because it measures active interest, not passive exposure. Someone searching for your brand name has moved from awareness to curiosity to action. Track both Google search volume and direct website traffic (people typing your URL directly) as leading indicators of fame effects.
For tentpole moments, expect search spikes within minutes of your advertising airing. The steeper the spike, the stronger the fame effect. But the more important question is what happens after the spike: does search volume settle at a higher baseline than before, or does it return to previous levels?
Fame isn't just about the brand name. It's about the distinctive assets, the visual, verbal, and sonic elements that trigger brand recognition. Strong distinctive assets let customers identify your brand without seeing the logo, think of the Cadbury purple, the AAMI jingle, or the Bunnings warehouse aesthetic.
Measure distinctive asset recognition before and after your tentpole campaign. Can more people correctly attribute your assets to your brand? Has recognition speed improved? The Harris Poll's Super Bowl analysis found that Lay's achieved a 5.7-point increase in consideration between pre and post-Super Bowl measurement periods, while brands like Dunkin' led on TV ad recall and asset recognition.
This requires pre-campaign baseline research and rapid post-campaign measurement, ideally within 48-72 hours while memories are fresh.
Modern tentpole viewing is a dual-screen experience. The 2025 Super Bowl generated 2.83 billion social media engagements across Instagram, X, and YouTube. Nike's "So Win" commercial generated nearly 13,000 online mentions, making it the most talked-about ad of the game.
Track your share of voice within category conversation during the event, not just volume. A thousand mentions mean nothing if your competitors are generating ten thousand. Sentiment matters too: are people talking about you positively, negatively, or neutrally? Are they sharing your content or criticising it?
Social signals are useful as real-time indicators during the event, but they're insufficient as standalone fame metrics. Lots of brands generate buzz that doesn't translate to commercial outcomes. Social engagement is a leading indicator, not a destination.
The strongest fame indicators are behavioural signals that sit closer to purchase. Wishlist adds, add-to-cart activity, app downloads, account sign-ups, and store locator searches all indicate that advertising has moved people toward action.
Super Bowl advertisers track these signals in real time, and the best ones adjust media and offer strategy mid-flight based on what they see. If a product featured in your Super Bowl spot is spiking on Amazon, shift budget toward capturing that demand before it dissipates.
For Australian brands, this requires retailer partnerships and data access agreements that should be established before your tentpole campaign launches, not scrambled together afterward.
Fame effects are time-sensitive. Nielsen research shows that advertising memories decay steeply in the first 24 hours after exposure, with branded recognition falling nearly in half overnight. If you're going to measure fame effects, you need to capture signals while they're fresh.
Here's how to structure a 72-hour measurement sprint around your tentpole campaign.
Set your baselines. Capture branded search volume, website traffic patterns, social mention volume and sentiment, and any retailer signals you have access to. These baselines let you calculate lift accurately rather than guessing at impact.
Code your creative assets. Identify every distinctive brand element in your advertising: colours, characters, taglines, sounds, visual motifs. Create a checklist for post-campaign recall testing.
Define your thresholds. What level of search lift, social engagement, or retail signal would justify mid-flight budget shifts? What would trigger a pivot in your paid media strategy? Having these thresholds pre-agreed means you can act quickly when data comes in.
Monitor signals in real time. Track branded search queries as they spike. Watch social conversation velocity and sentiment. Monitor website traffic and, if you have access, retailer signals.
Tag everything. Record timestamps for when your advertising aired, when competitor advertising aired, and when significant event moments happened (goals, big plays, controversial calls). This timeline lets you attribute signal spikes to specific triggers.
Be ready to adjust. If your creative is generating exceptional response, you may want to increase paid social amplification immediately. If response is weaker than expected, you may want to shift creative emphasis or offer strategy. The brands that win tentpole moments are the ones prepared to act on data, not just observe it.
Run your attribution sanity check. Compare post-event signal levels against your pre-event baselines. Calculate actual lift in branded search, traffic, social engagement, and retail signals.
Decompose spike versus base. The spike is what happened during and immediately after the event. The base is where signals settle 48-72 hours later. A big spike that returns to baseline means you generated attention but didn't build lasting memory structures. A smaller spike that settles at a higher baseline suggests genuine fame-building.
Launch rapid recall research. Survey a sample of your target audience on advertising recall, brand recall, and distinctive asset recognition. Compare against your pre-event baseline. This is the direct measure of whether your advertising built memory structures.
Australian winter sports offer multiple tentpole opportunities throughout the season. The key is choosing the right moments and preparing properly.
Choose your moments strategically: Not every broadcast is a tentpole. Focus on moments that concentrate audience attention: season launch rounds, rivalry matchups (Collingwood versus Carlton, NSW versus Queensland), finals series, grand finals, and cultural events like Dreamtime at the 'G or ANZAC Day matches. These are the moments when fame effects are possible.
Align your codes to the codes: Effective tentpole advertising connects to the cultural moment. Consider jersey colours, team chants, commentary catchphrases, and fan rituals. The brands that perform best at AFL and NRL tentpoles aren't just buying airtime. They're embedding themselves in the cultural fabric of the event.
Build your data partnerships early: Access to retailer signals, publisher data, and real-time analytics requires relationships established before the event. If you're planning a Grand Final campaign, start building those data access agreements months in advance.
Create your measurement infrastructure: Build dashboards that track your four signal categories (search, traffic, asset recall, retail) in near-real time. Engage your research agency for rapid post-event surveys. Have your media buying team ready to act on threshold triggers.
The ultimate measure of tentpole advertising success isn't the spike. It's what happens after the spike fades. One agency working with Super Bowl advertisers describes the healthiest outcome as a "structural step up": brand and business metrics settle at a higher floor after the initial attention dissipates.
This requires connecting your 72-hour measurement sprint to longer-term brand tracking. Did the tentpole campaign shift mental availability? Did consideration increase? Did price sensitivity decrease? Did base sales improve independent of promotional activity?
These questions can't be answered in 72 hours. But the 72-hour sprint gives you the leading indicators, and over time, you can build models that predict which fame signals translate into base-building outcomes for your brand.
You don't need an $8 million Super Bowl spot to build fame. You need cultural moments that concentrate attention, creative that connects to those moments, and measurement systems that capture fame effects while they're fresh.
Australian tentpoles offer those opportunities. The AFL Grand Final. State of Origin. NRL Finals. Gather Round. These are our Super Bowl moments. The question is whether we're measuring them with the same rigour, and translating those insights into lasting commercial advantage.
That's the real lesson from Super Bowl advertising: not how to spend $10 million, but how to measure $10 million worth of fame effects from whatever you're spending now.
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Planning a winter campaign around AFL or NRL tentpoles? We help Australian brands build measurement frameworks that capture fame effects and connect them to commercial outcomes. Get in touch!