If results tell the story, Hulu has a great yarn to spin about advertising in last year’s Super Bowl LI in which the New England Patriots came back from the greatest deficit in Super Bowl history to overcome the Atlanta Falcons in the game’s first-ever overtime.

Hulu bought a spot for its new show, The Handmaid’s Tale, in the Super Bowl, marking the first reveal for the service’s big new drama. Hulu also bought the first spot in the game’s four-ad overtime advertising pod, should there be an overtime, which there never had been before.

It all paid off. The Super Bowl did, in fact, go into overtime and with the whole game on the line, viewership was huge. Hulu got tons of eyeballs on its spot for a show on which it had pinned a lot of hopes.

And those hopes were valid: The Handmaid’s Tale went on to become the first streaming drama to win the Emmy for outstanding drama, upsetting three Netflix entries — The Crown, Stranger Things and House of Cards— HBO’s Westworld, NBC’s This Is Us and AMC’s Better Call Saul. Earlier this month, it won the Golden Globe as well.

RELATED: Hulu, Amazon, HBO Clean Up at Golden Globes

Season two of The Handmaid’s Tale is due out April 25.

Last year’s Super Bowl spot wasn’t Hulu’s first visit to the Big Game — it did two brand-focused spots in 2009, starring Alec Baldwin, and in 2012, starring Will Arnett. Crispin Porter + Bogusky was the agency behind both of those campaigns but no word on whether the agency will direct this year.

The Handmaid’s Tale has been behind a big spike in Hulu viewership, with the streaming service now boasting 17 million U.S. subscribers. Earlier this week, it announced it had picked up the exclusive streaming rights to Warner Bros.’ ER and it also has acquired six-part series Catch-22, which George Clooney will star in, direct and produce.

​READ MORE: Adweek

[Images of The Handmaid’s Tale courtesy of Adweek]

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