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Priceline has been doling out travel deals for nearly 26 years, with Kaley Cuoco serving as the company’s spokesperson for a decade.

Both Priceline and Cuoco understand the value of both short-term deals and long-term investments, which is why their approach to this year’s Super Bowl looks different than prior years.

Priceline had in-game Super Bowl ads featuring its 15-year spokesperson William Shatner—the Priceline Negotiator–in 2009 and 2012. Shatner handed the torch to Cuoco in a pre-game ad in 2013, before featuring both in pre- and post-game ads in 2015. This year, it has a 30-second pregame ad, but it also has a blend of shorter digital spots, social media posts and shoppable Easter eggs that make it less dependent on the game broadcast itself.

“We have run in pregame, we’ve run in the game, but this is the first time that we have built our campaign in surround sound around the game,” said Lesley Klein, Priceline’s svp of strategy and brand marketing. Klein also sees an opportunity in this economic climate to invest more money in giving customers deals instead of for an in-game spot.

Partnering with creative agency Mirimar, which just won Priceline’s business last year, the travel site put together its “Go to Your Happy Price” campaign featuring eight digital adds of 15 to 90 seconds each. Built like a comedy series and replete with 20th Century sitcom tropes—including a self-referential sitcom-style theme song—the spots also include $5 million in clickable deals that take users right from the ad to Priceline’s booking site.

Instead of airing one ad, Priceline hopes consumers will remember all year. Priceline and Mirimar have created a series of elements that vie for a traveler’s attention throughout the game and well afterward.

“We’re up against bigger competitors in the industry: We can’t just simply outspend them,” said John McKelvey, Mirimar’s founder and chief commercial officer. “So let’s overindex on personality. Let’s be memorable, entertaining, and let’s use musicality, knowing that the sonic branding and the audio aspect of this really is part of the memorability.”

A learning campaign

The yearlong campaign kicks off with a 30-second pregame ad called “Inflataboy,” featuring a father literally deflating his son by telling him their family can’t go on vacation this year. Cuoco suggests Priceline’s discounts might make an all-inclusive trip possible, restoring the boy to his former self.

Meanwhile, Priceline partnered with shoppable video developer Smartzer for an online ad to run during the game on YouTube, Meta and TikTok. Viewers who find the Easter eggs—gold bricks—in the video can redeem them for $1,000 off their flight, hotel or car rental if booked by the final whistle. In honor of Super Bowl LVII, only 57 of those big discounts will be handed out during the game. However, Klein noted that there will be other offers available long after the teams leave the field.

“We meticulously crafted the environments that you’ll see in the ads, and they are loaded with these really cute and kitschy props,” Klein said. “If you hover over these props, you will be exposed to a promo code that drives into our website and delivers deals.”

Ultimately, the goal is to introduce new consumers to Priceline’s platform and show them around in a fun way. Both Priceline and Mirimar wanted Super Bowl newcomers to visit the site multiple times throughout the promotion to get a feel for chasing down Priceline’s “Express Deals,” which requires users to check back in every so often. By building a game, sprinkling in deals and including reminders to come back to the site, Priceline’s digital promotion trains its new customers in a way that a one-of Super Bowl ad just can’t.

“It’s important to create promotions and interactive experiences that encourage consumers to interact with the brand in a genuine way,” McKelvey said. “Use the platform, use the product, get the feel for it, make it part of your life—don’t simply dangle golden carrots that go away after the end of the engagement.”

Finding a voice

But getting people on the site and through the paces isn’t enough: Priceline wants to drill itself into their subconscious.

While Cuoco has been the company’s “travel ringleader” for a decade and has provided it a face, it hasn’t had an audible, persistent, earworm of a market presence since its five-second “Priceline Negotiator” theme. One of this campaign’s bigger bets is that the bouncy T.G.I.F. prime-time lilt of “Go to your happy place/for a happy price” will keep bringing consumers back to Priceline even when the ads aren’t airing.

Emphasizing the importance of jingles, stings and “sonic branding,” Priceline and Mirimar teamed up with sound design firm Barking Owl to come up with a play on a sitcom theme song. The goal is both to fill the brand’s aural void and make people envision Priceline as quickly as “ba da ba ba ba” conjures images of a Big Mac for consumers of a certain age. 

“I feel like sound is not used enough for its power when it comes to memorability,” McKelvey said. “We wanted to kind of create these recurring elements to the whole campaign that could be ownable, that suit both commercials and social settings like Tiktok and Instagram.”

As a result, each ad begins with the same intro and ends with the same jingle about getting to your happy place with a happy price. All parties involved aimed for catchiness but reinforced it with repetition just to make sure the viewer wouldn’t forget it.

More importantly, however, the music ties all of Priceline’s marketing elements together in a package that hasn’t existed in a while. McKelvey referred back to Shatner’s Priceline Negotiator as part of Priceline’s iconic brand, but that campaign fused a character, simple messaging, an even simpler theme song and consumer tools like the Priceline app into one powerful sales pitch. While Cuoco has given Priceline’s marketing stability for a decade, she hasn’t enjoyed some of the same support her predecessor received in building Priceline into a household brand. With a song and a story, that may be about to change.

“We want to lean into the strengths of our legacy, but really take us into a more modern era and into the future, and this audio element is going to do that,” Klein said. “The other piece is that Kaylee has been with us for a decade. She brings such amazing comedic, and storytelling strengths in her acting skills, in her demeanor and her facial expressions. We wanted to lean into that and actually build this world around her.”