Campaign Imminent: Prudential sponsors the Rose Bowl for the next three seasons (Score 69)

Sales Lead: Prudential recently announced an official sponsorship of the Rose Bowl Game through the 2025-2026 games.

• To make the sponsorship possible, Prudential teamed up with Disney Advertising and the Tournament of Roses.
• The company will sponsor the next three college football seasons, which will likely lead to more sports marketing in general as well as experiential activation investment.
  • Prudential has started leaning more heavily into sports marketing with player sponsorships and a new campaign, which it launched for the US Open tennis tournament.
• The partnership also allows Prudential category exclusivity across both the College Football Playoff and the Tournament of Roses in the wealth management, life insurance, and financial advisory categories.
• The company will likely:
  • Pursue additional sports sponsorships with organizations, teams, and players
  • Ramp up experiential efforts
  • Return to higher spend
  • Conduct additional agency reviews following a recent hire (more below)
• Target demographic: 
  • Millennial and Gen-X men

Additional spending insights:

• Broadcast insights (TV ad creative spend, effectiveness, impressions, and performance)
  • YTD spend: Prudential has spent approximately $11.5m on national TV commercials YTD, down 5% from the approximately $12.1m spent by this point last year.
  • Last year: The company spent around $23.5m on this channel last year after spending only almost half of this, around $13.8m in 2021.
  • 2023 ad programming: Prudential's 2023 commercials have targeted older millennials and Gen-X watching shows such as College Basketball, ABC World News Tonight With David Muir, CBS Evening News With Norah O'Donnell, NFL Football, and Good Morning America.
• Digital and social insights (digital ad spend, effectiveness, impressions, and performance)
  • YTD spend: Since the beginning of 2023, the financial services provider has allocated roughly $4.8m toward digital ads, down 19% from the roughly $5.9m allocated within the same 2022 timeframe.
  • YTD data: Prudential has earned about 541.1m digital impressions YTD via Facebook (28%), YouTube (24%), desktop display (24%), Instagram (18%), mobile display (4%), and desktop video (2%) ads.
  • Last year: In 2022, the company's estimated full-year spend increased by 41% to $11.7m from that of $8.3m in 2021.
• Additional channel insights  
  • The company utilizes print (magazines), digital, OOH, local broadcast, radio, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and online video (primarily via Youtube.com and Youtube Android) ads.
  • Prudential sponsors podcasts such as The Herd with Colin Cowherd, Global News Podcast, the Joel Osteen Podcast, The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, and TechStuff.
  • The company also invests in short-form DRTV ads.
    • ​​​​​​​It has extremely highly concentrated network TV coverage and will not likely launch a new campaign soon.
    • Prudential's top TV networks include BRV, TRV, TFN, and HGTV.

Additional agency insights:

• Opportunity: If you haven't yet done so, reach out soon to see if any additional roster shifts follow last year's appointment of creative AOR McCann.
• Current agency roster:
  • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​McCann: Creative AOR (July 2022)
  • Bounteous: Digital agency partner

Insight Sources: Broadcast insights estimated by iSpot; digital spend insights estimated by Pathmatics; additional channel insights estimated by Vivvix; podcast insights by Podchaser; DRTV insights by Media Analytics.