Popcorners Breaking Bad Commercial Delights Viewers

Evelyn Susco, Reporter

The Super Bowl is a time when many companies take advantage of the millions of viewers watching, and fabricate innovative and captivating advertisements to represent their companies.  Super Bowl LVII took place February 12th, and amounted to approximately two-hundred million viewers. Popcorners used this opportunity for their very first Super Bowl campaign. With the help of the second greatest show of all time according to IMDb, Popcorners was able to create an advertisement that scored an “A” by the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, which grades commercials annually in its Super Bowl Advertising Review.

The reimagination of the Golden Globe Award winning television series, Breaking Bad, that Popcorners presented was exactly what it needed to captivate viewers and extend their product. We wonder, why was this an ingenious move by Popcorners?  The show, which streamed from 2008 through 2013, has amassed a large fanbase, especially after its finale, which amounted to over ten million viewers. The Breaking Bad universe didn’t stop after the show, and continued to produce a movie, El Camino, and Critic’s Choice Award winning television series Better Call Saul.  Seeing how much adoration and success this universe has acquired, it is reasonable to conclude that Popcorners’s reimagination would grasp attention.  

Was Popcorners successful in their strategy? Not enough time has passed to see the effect it had on sales, but Popcorners’s social media presence has been on a rise since. Prior to the Super Bowl, Popcorners, Aaron Paul, Bryan Cranston, and Raymond Cruz all posted images and clips of the advertisement on Instagram to make sure people were awaiting its arrival on February 12th. After the Super Bowl, Sprinklr, a company that tracks trending events, found that, “over 28,000 people talking about the Super Bowl online also mentioned the PopCorners ad.” Although it is too soon to see the economic outcomes of their strategy, Popcorners’s reimagination of Breaking Bad was creative, and a seemingly successful marketing tactic for the company.