| Coming into Super Bowl week, the Volvo marketing team is pulling off another trick play. The company has promised to give out $2 million of its Swedish machines if anyone scores a safety in the big ball game Sunday. Safety, of course, is the brand's north star. The message is a bit incongruous with a quarterback getting mauled by car-sized humans, but you get the point. To qualify, fans will have to kit out their dream Volvo on the company's site before the game; winners -- if there are any -- will be chosen at random. These game gimmicks — so-called trigger promotions in marketingspeak — are increasingly common and almost always savvy. It's a page that any AAA ball club owner has thoroughly dog-eared. Most notably, Taco Bell has gone deep in the World Series with its "steal-a-base"-win-a-taco-type-thing campaign. Volvo, meanwhile, is always happy to subtly troll its earnest Teutonic rivals, and cheaply at that. For one thing, $2 million worth of Volvos is not a lot of Volvos. In December, the average Volvo went for just shy of $50,000 in the U.S. and the company moved 37,000 of them. Secondly, Volvo probably won't have to make good on the deal. There have only been nine safeties in Super Bowl history, putting the chance at just north of 17%. Though safeties are getting more common; almost half of the Super Bowl safeties were scored since 2009. If the unlikely happens, Volvo will get a social boost worth far more than $2 million. Marketing folks call this an "activation." A static ad is fine, providing one pours enough money into it; an "activation" gets people involved and keeps them interested for more than 30 seconds. The giveaway gimmick is essentially a publicity put option — albeit one that also gets thousands of people to tinker around on the company's web site in advance. Smart marketers go so far as to hedge their bet with prize indemnity insurance. If some half-time hero manages to sink the half-court shot, the sponsor doesn't have to pay for the prize in full. Volvo is getting good at this kind of thing. For the 2015 Super Bowl, it encouraged fans to Tweet why someone they know might deserve a free vehicle — its XC60 — every time the Super Bowl broadcast rolled a car commercial (which its rivals had ponied up $4.5 million apiece for). The trolling drummed up at least 55,000 tweets and the next month XC60 sales jumped by 71%. Dubbed the interception, Volvo reckoned it snagged about $44 million in media buzz. In the football business that's known as out kicking the coverage.  Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Feb. 01, 2021. Subscribe now. Illustration: Viktor Hachmang for Bloomberg Businessweek | 
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