SMARTEST SUPER BOWL PROMO: StockX cameo in Rocket Homes & Mortgage ad with Anna Kendrick & Barbie

The Rocket Homes & Rocket Mortgage team came strong with a blink-and-you-miss-it cross promotion in their Super Bowl ad with Anna Kendrick. No, it isn’t the Barbie Dream House cross promo complete with realtors, cash buyers, bidding wars — plus He-Man and Skeletor as neighbors! It’s the StockX QR code t-shirt a kid was wearing in the ad.

StockX started as a sneaker exchange backed by Rock Ventures, which is Rocket Mortgage founder Dan Gilbert’s investment mothership. Now StockX is the exchange for shoes, apparel, and basically any collectible you care about as a pop culture junkie — including Mattel toys like Barbie, He-Man, and Skeletor.

See where this is going? Amazon started in books and we know where that went. StockX started with shoes and this ad strategy tells us how big it can get. Also the StockX collectibles expansion strategy perfectly positions it to capitalize on the NFT era.

I believe this Rocket Mortgage StockX Super Bowl ad is special not just for its creativity, but because of the depth behind this playbook.

StockX and Rocket are part of the same family — or Circle of Power, as The Basis Point calls it — and this playbook is a long-game happening at the highest levels of the family.

Jay Farner is on the StockX board, was formerly CMO of Rocket Mortgage, then served as CEO of Rocket Mortgage, and was just elevated to head of Rocket Central, which said this about their strategy in a January 2022 announcement:

Rocket Central is the centralized hub for the Rocket Companies fintech platform. Farner will retain his role at Rocket Companies to continue driving the growth of the entire ecosystem from mortgage and real estate to car sales and personal finance.

In his new role at Rocket Central, Farner will drive the vision for the technology, data, product design, marketing, communications and other services the company provides – ensuring there is a consistent, seamless experience for clients across the Rocket Companies ecosystem.

This Super Bowl ad was the first high-budget example of how to bring all brands together to support each other, and while Farner is perfectly suited to run it, the talent runs deep.

Casey Hurbis is a Big Ad exec who came in as Rocket CMO a year after the company brought the newly-launched Rocket Mortgage brand into the mainstream with a 2016 Super Bowl ad. Back then, the company was Quicken Loans and the product was Rocket Mortgage. Casey has been running a $1 billion-ish annual budget to build the Rocket brand into a household name since then. And StockX CMO Deena Bahri is a Harvard MBA who previously led brands like Helix, Birchbox, Gilt Groupe, and Reebok.

I think their joint treatment of StockX as a subversive-cool but mainstream-potential brand was spot on here.

Crypto giant Coinbase definitely deserves a related shout out for smart QR code use in their Super Bowl ad. It was so successful, it crashed their site.

But I wanted to shout out the Rocket Mortgage StockX Super Bowl ad in more detail because it reveals a long game Rocket has been alluding to since their pre-IPO S-1 dropped.

Below is the screenshot of the kid in the Rocket ad wearing the StockX QR code shirt, and here’s where the StockX QR code takes you. Once there, you enter to win (only until 2/14/22) a StockX Super Bowl pack with special Nike Jordans and a bunch of Snoop, Dre, and Kendrick collectibles.