Just over a week ago, as the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs faced off in Super Bowl 59, Universal Destinations & Experiences introduced its newest Orlando park, Epic Universe, to 127 million Americans.
The 30-second commercial was released late last year. But the ad for the first major U.S. theme park to open in two decades, as well as four corresponding land spots for Super Nintendo World, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic, How to Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk, and the Dark Universe, got a major boost during one of TV’s biggest annual events.
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“These spots involved hundreds of people who not only provided input and research from our guests, but also helped with the production and creative work — the imagining of those spots and the placement of them. That includes our operational team who helped us envision them,” says Alice Norsworthy, President, Global Marketing, Universal Destinations & Experiences. “It takes a village to create this kind of an experience, and the campaign itself goes much broader across a range of channels and mediums.”
With an average of $8 million spent per 30 seconds for advertisers this year, Universal’s spot follows a months-long multifaceted marketing campaign that goes beyond Michael Bublé-soundtracked ads teasing Universal Orlando Resorts’ new and existing park offerings.
In just the last year, the park had a global introduction as part of the 2024 Olympics, before a New York Comic Con event in the fall. Preview centers with park models and merch also popped up in Orlando and Los Angeles alongside the rollout of exclusive podcast conversations, concept art and animated fly-throughs of the lands and new resort properties like Helios Grand Hotel, behind the scenes looks and teasers of new attractions and tech advances and first-looks at the park’s sprawling culinary offerings.
It’s all building to the May 22 opening day. Following the Super Bowl, Norsworthy spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how Universal Destinations & Experiences is building a modern theme park marketing campaign and why it used the Super Bowl to help elevate it.
When did the larger, overall marketing campaign discussions about Epic Universe begin?
Really since the days that Epic was just an idea on the page, we knew, given the groundbreaking nature of this experience, that we needed a stellar marketing campaign to bring out the most ambitious projects we had done to date and to bring this to life for our fans and our guests, meeting their level of expectation. So it started with an announcement in 2019 and since then, we have really been ideating around the best way to introduce this incredible theme park to the world. Our work with [international advertising agency] Lucky Generals began several years ago, and they’ve been a great partner in that process, along with many other partners that have helped us in telling the story of Epic to our audience and our fans.
Part of the park’s marketing is literally in its name, but what does that mean emotionally, visually, and narratively when trying to craft a campaign around the concept of epic experiences in beloved universes?
This began with speaking to our guests about the park, and what they said when we were building it, which was that we love your brand of storytelling, your immersive attractions and experiences. Give us more of what we love, and we’ll give you more of our time. So our challenge was really how do we evoke that same level of emotion that our fans have for the properties and for our experiences in a way that showcases this new product and the ingenuity of the product. The essence of Epic Universe is that it takes people to places that they only dare imagine and will allow them to interact with the stories and characters they love.
So the [Super Bowl] spots were really meant to just give you a glimpse of what awaits guests at Epic Universe, a multi-sensory, mind-blowing experience that will elicit a full range of emotions: fear, joy, exhilaration, and even awe. We know that when our guests go there, those are the kinds of emotions they’ll feel. That vision has really stayed relatively true throughout the entirety of that campaign. We just want to share this new level of experience in a way that lives up to a product that can only be described as epic.
Two and a half decades ago, you did not have video-driven social media platforms and influencers, streaming platforms with live TV, the podcast industry, phones that operate like mini-computers. Now that exists alongside radio, linear TV, and the digital and legacy publishing space. How might launching a marketing campaign for Epic be different from the last time a major theme park opened in Orlando or in the U.S.? And what aspects of this new media landscape are you leaning on to reach potential parkgoers?
As you said, marketing has dramatically evolved, just even in the last 10 years — five years with some platforms. That has resulted in higher expectations from our guests for more rich, relevant content than ever before. Audiences are looking for highly engaging and entertaining information across all of those platforms, all of the time, and sometimes all at once. So we know that we need to be in all of those places where guests are looking for information. Our audience is broad as well, and we’ve been present on a wide variety of platforms with content that speaks to what those audiences are looking for on those particular platforms.
We’ve released long format videos and some behind the scenes interviews that provide a more in depth look at the worlds, our hotels, and the entire resort property as they’re coming to life, for the fans who are really hungry for those details. We’ve also shared the full detail of the experience across our websites and with the help of many of our marketing partners. We’ve engaged the fans on social platforms — our platforms, their platforms — with up to the minute news, fun facts, first looks at food and other various elements. We’ve also used advertising and short content platforms to tease guests and inspire them to want to find out more once we move into the preview period. We’re excited to provide access to guests to allow them to tell that story for us. All of those elements we know we need to be there where guests are looking for information on us, and we’re certainly looking at a comprehensive strategy to do that.
Something that was around 20 years ago was high profile Super Bowl commercials. Why did that event feel like the right platform to elevate your national video ad campaign?
The Super Bowl has the reach and attention that we really needed at a time when people are starting to think about and plan their summer vacations. So it really was both the right time and the right audience. Plus people actually look forward to watching the commercials in the Super Bowl in addition to the sports. We really wanted to be part of that excitement and ensure that we were meeting our guests where they are.
All the spots, alongside campaign elements like the podcasts, fly-over videos, and concept art releases, are driven by immersion and transportation — the feeling of being taken from everyday life and catapulted into something “epic.” Specifically for the spots, you also highlight different audiences with each land. Can you talk about deciding which land elements — attractions, food, character appearances, environments — you wanted to adapt and who you envisioned in them to help realize the park’s feature-length storytelling approach for people who haven’t been there yet?
We knew that if we could just help guests visualize a small glimpse of what’s in store and what they’ll experience in a short form, that would at least inspire them to want to find out more. So the portals are a vehicle to help transport you to these worlds, not just physically, but all the sight, sound and emotion of the stories and characters that you love that will come to life around you. Then we tried to portray the essence of what it would feel like to be in each of those lands. The scenes were actually chosen from a variety of the elements. They included the attractions, entertainment, the environment itself, to really portray the immersive nature.
With the range of products we have at Epic Universe, it was difficult to capture it in just 29 seconds or even a minute. But as we do have a wide variety of audiences and guests that come and visit us, we really wanted to show not only the range of experiences you can have in each of the lands, but also the range of emotions that you feel when you’re in those lands. And while we chose different audiences within each of our four spots, I will say they’re interchangeable, and any of those audiences could have an enriching experience at any of these lands.
A lot of visual concept art has been released, but in these spots, you tease attractions which appear to have real elements of the rides. Are people looking at already built aspects of Epic Universe in these spots or was this all a replica environment and visual effects?
Yes, it was based on some real elements of the attractions, the entertainment and the environment, for sure. We also had to create some of it before the park was complete and welcoming guests. So there is a bit of an element there of taking some of what we have and putting it together with elements you can imagine to bring it to audiences in a way that really provides the essence of the experience. Rather than trying to be very literal around what the experience is, we tried to capture real moments in the attractions and entertainment and the environment that will provide that feeling for you.
You have spots for four lands, but Epic Universe has five with Celestial Park. Can you talk about the decision to not yet have a spot for that fifth park?
In the collection, we tried to provide the breadth and scope of what our offering is in all five of the lands. But we focused on those four lands because those are places that people dream of going — Super Nintendo World, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – the Ministry of Magic, How to Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk and Dark universe, which is showcasing the history of Universal’s classic monsters. We do know though once people visit Celestial Park, our fifth world, they’ll dream of coming back because they will have that same level of emotion and experience we’re providing in the other lands.
The Helios Grand Hotel is major in that it is the only hotel in the Universal Orlando Resort catalog to be inside the actual theme park. It didn’t get a spot, but can parkgoers expect any more reveals on it?
We’ve highlighted it along the way with a behind-the-scenes video that showcased our hotels, but yes, we will have another moment for you to enjoy Helios Grand Hotel, as well as the views that you’ll have from that spectacular hotel of the entire Epic Universe project.
Ahead of the May 22 opening, what else might people expect from this campaign’s rollout, which has already featured concept art, comic con panels, preview centers, and behind the scenes looks at attractions?
You will continue to see more innovative ways of reaching and engaging our guests across all the platforms we talked about as we try to tell what is really a full and enriching story of not only Epic Universe, but the entire Universal Orlando Resort destination — four parks, City Walk, 11 hotels. Our marketing and sales partners will also continue to help us tell that story. Expect to see a few innovative portal moments along the way, but what I’m most excited about is really just having our guests and fans visit Epic Universe and share their stories and experiences. I am confident that when they do, it’ll be the best marketing we could have.
