For the last three years, the web development brand Wix.com has booked a ticket to the Super Bowl with some of the Super Bowliest, most buzz-worthy ads in the games. In 2015, it was a collection of NFL legends like Brett Favre, Emmitt Smith, and Terrell Owens. In 2016, it was a partnership with Dreamworks that featured characters from the Kung Fu Panda franchise. And last year, it was an action slugfest starring Gal Gadot and Jason Statham. But this year, the brand has decided to sit the big game out.
Is it that the Super Bowl’s advertising relevance is dwindling? That TV commercials are finally, after years of premature declaration, actually dead? Of course not. Wix chief marketing officer Omer Shai says it’s actually the success of their previous Super Bowl ads that have given them the option to skip the big game.
“We had a great three years and saw great results from the campaigns we did. We’ve seen the amount of people searching for Wix has grown year over year,” says Shai. “But in the second part of last year, something changed. We moved our marketing budget from TV to online and we found it worked very well for us, with really impressive growth since. This is what really informed this decision.”
Over the past few months, Wix has launched ads with a handful of Super Bowl-worthy celebrities, including Karlie Kloss, Will Ferrell, and Zooey Deschanel. But Shai says the response has been great enough that they decided to re-allocate the budget that’s been spent on a big game commercial slot to creating more content elsewhere. A good chunk of it will go toward raising awareness for the company’s new product called Code, aimed at developers and designers.
Wix has also been growing its in-house marketing department, which Shai says has grown by about 30% in the last year to 220 people.
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