Buffalo Wild Wings recruits Brett Favre for cheeky Super Bowl ad

When the lights went out during the Super Bowl in New Orleans in 2013, a marketer for Buffalo Wild Wings sent out a tweet that said, "We just really don't want football season to end. Can you blame us?"

The message was one of a handful by advertisers during that 33-minute delay to demonstrate how powerful the marriage of in-the-moment wit and social media can be. But for Buffalo Wild Wings, there was another lesson: that people embraced the cheeky claim that it wields mystical power over sports events.

On Sunday, Buffalo Wild Wings jumps onto the bigger, more expensive stage of Super Bowl TV advertising with a spot during the pregame show that builds on its myth of sports omnipotence. It's a tale with particular appeal in the Upper Midwest, the "explanation" for why Brett Favre, the Hall of Fame quarterback who spent many years with the Green Bay Packers and two with the Minnesota Vikings, is the most-intercepted passer in NFL history.

"The unseen force is something that is so much a part of sports, and people want to experience the strange things," Bob Ruhland, the company's vice president of marketing, said. "When a team comes back from three touchdowns in the fourth quarter, they want to be there and share it and they need a partner and Buffalo Wild Wings is that partner."

With the spot, the Golden Valley-based company joins a handful of other Minnesota companies that have advertised on the most-watched TV event of the year. Best Buy advertised in the Super Bowl for a number of years with the help of such celebrities as Amy Poehler and Justin Bieber. General Mills in 2014 had a memorable ad that depicted an interracial family eating Cheerios, its top-selling cereal.

Twin Cities advertising agencies are also often involved in Super Bowl marketing. This year, Minneapolis-based Fallon is producing a 60-second spot for tax preparer H&R Block. It will feature actor Jon Hamm and air during the game's first quarter at an estimated cost of around $10 million. The commercial, which won't go public until Sunday, highlights H&R Block's new partnership with IBM Corp. in which tax preparers will use IBM's cognitive technology platform to ensure customers aren't missing out on tax refunds. H&R Block hasn't had an ad in the big game since 2009. This year, it will go head-to-head with competitor Intuit Inc., which will have a 45-second spot for TurboTax featuring Humpty Dumpty.

"Broadly speaking, taxes are not a sexy subject; nobody wants to think about them," said Jeff Kling, Fallon's chief creative officer. "They are a burden. … If you show up on the biggest media stage and you create familiarity by doing so, you are doing yourself a big favor, and you are helping people get over their unwillingness to approach a difficult topic."

Buffalo Wild Wings is spending less for a shorter spot that will air between 4 and 4:30 p.m. Minnesota time, about an hour before the game's 5:30 scheduled start. And the spot itself is just the most visible element of a marketing effort that includes other videos, web and social media elements and a public relations push.

The campaign started on Jan. 22 with a 30-second ad that ran with the NFL's conference championship games showing Favre throwing a football in a farm field, hitting targets and trying to reconcile his accuracy in retirement with his interception record. "It just doesn't make any sense," Favre declares. Just then, two men pull up in a black sedan and tell him they need to talk.

In Sunday's spot, a briefcase has video evidence of a force taking control of his passes and guiding them to opponents. "It was Buffalo Wild Wings," one says. The company's logo appears at the end of the commercial with the words "It Wasn't Us" that fritz out and lose the "n't."

The company over the past decade has been one of the fastest-growing restaurant chains in the country. But its growth has started to level off, and it came under pressure from an activist shareholder who wants it to change its business model to rely more heavily on franchisees. Chief Executive Sally Smith in October said, "This is a pivotal time in Buffalo Wild Wings history."

For regular customers of the 1,200-unit chain, the spot builds on a myth that the chain has a button that can control sports games. A long-running social media interplay at Buffalo Wild Wings is the Twitter hashtag "#hitthebutton," which is tweeted by customers at restaurants when they are having fun watching a game and want the company to invoke its mystical power to extend it. The company added the hashtag to the end of the Super Bowl spot.

It tested the commercial and broader campaign with focus groups to be sure people who weren't regular customers got the point.

The spot and related videos have generated 16 million views on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook over the past two weeks. Ruhland said executives will decide later this year whether Buffalo Wild Wings will advertise again on Super Bowl Sunday, and possibly during the game itself.

"You really want to try to derive as much value and engagement around what you do with the least amount of resources," he said. "So we thought let's take a look at pregame and see if we can generate Super Bowl numbers around it."