Some people watch the Super Bowl for the actual football game being played. Many attend the event for the halftime show or as an excuse to eat wings and other snacks on game day. Some watch it to find better software solutions for their company — maybe?
Papaya Global hopes so. The late-stage global workforce payments startup is running a 30-second ad on Sunday. The aim of the ad is to highlight the company’s software, which helps other companies stay compliant with its payroll function for cross-border teams. Set inside an office, the ad is a relatively innocent Super Bowl ad compared to Super Bowl stalwarts like Budweiser and McDonald’s, who each year use humor, celebrity and high production value to grab attention.
However, it’s not surprising that Papaya’s ad isn’t very impressive given that Papaya is a B2B software company. While it’s not uncommon for B2B startups to advertise through traditional consumer strategies, running an ad in the Super Bowl is very different from buying ads on a New York subway or a billboard on a San Francisco freeway. Super Bowl ads cost $7 million for a 30-second slot this year.
Bernd Schmitt, a professor at Columbia Business School who focused on branding and advertising, said you don’t see many B2B companies advertising in the Super Bowl because while it’s a huge audience, it’s too broad to be effective for many companies. But he said there may be at least one reason to do it: It boosts prowess and shows a company has money. that can help businesses stand out in a crowded category.
“It gives you bragging rights,” Schmitt said. “Now I can say, ‘Oh, we had an ad in the Super Bowl.’ It changes the image. It sounds like you’re a major player, a serious player.”
Standing out was a big part of why Papaya decided to do the Super Bowl ad, according to the company’s vice president of brand and communications, Jessica Malamud. Malamud said the employee payments space has become more crowded since the company originally started. Startups like Oyster HR and Remote have gained ground. Additionally, name recognition is also very important in a category such as payroll providers.
“We’re in an environment, it’s not a green field anymore,” Malamud said. “We grew and became a hyper-growth company and had so much success, but it was all green. Now we have to fight harder.”
Although the exposure means that many new people will be able to learn about Papaya, the majority of people who will see the Super Bowl ad do not need to know about Papaya and will not benefit Papaya by learning about it. But because Papaya works with companies across a wide range of sizes and industries, advertising could have a better return on investment (ROI) for the business than a B2B company with a narrower customer focus, Schmitt said.
“If you have the money to do it, it doesn’t seem completely crazy,” Schmitt said. “For a B2B company where a company sells to large companies, it seems like a silly idea. If you have a much more nuanced target, very small targets, a long tail of all these B2B companies, it might be OK.”
Whether the advertising campaign is successful or not will be difficult to detect. If McDonald’s advertises a burger during the game, they can look at the burger sales before and after the game. It’s pretty cut and dry. B2B sales cycles don’t work that way, making ROI harder to quantify. A company could become interested in Papaya from the ad, but be locked into a contract with another payroll provider for months or years, for example, making it harder to track which sales came from the ad.
Hila Perl, the director of communications at Papaya, said the company doesn’t think of advertising as a direct production strategy.
“It’s not so we can sell more,” Perl said. “Obviously yes, we want to see a very immediate return on investment, but we all understand that this is a brand building or brand awareness play. It’s not a lead generation game. In my mind, it’s always more of a marathon than a sprint. It requires sometimes these larger investments to plan it in advance to see how the vision translates.”
There really haven’t been many B2B startups that have tried this marketing route to point. But one could draw a dividing line between Papaya’s strategy and Squarespace’s. While Squarespace is no longer a startup and has more of a B2B flavor than just B2B — it helps small businesses build websites — it ran Super Bowl ads for years in its startup days.
David Lee, the chief creative officer at Squarespace, told TechCrunch that the company decided to run these ads because it felt it had a great product that no one had ever heard of. Squarespace was already profitable with money to spend. It wouldn’t be the right strategy for every startup, Lee said, but it led to a boost in business and brand recognition.
“Try to make sure you’re relevant. it’s a silver bullet to put you on a map right away,” Lee said. “Everyone has to decide [whether it will] well worth the investment. what I would argue is that it’s really hard to get noticed these days.”
While it may be difficult for Papaya to track the direct ROI from the ad, we’ll know if the company felt it was an overall success if we see a commercial from the company during next year’s Super Bowl.
