Animation and Creative Direction for Fetch’s Super Bowl Livestream

Company: Fetch

Agency partner: Monks

Role: Experience Design, Creative Direction, Cross-Functional Leadership

The Challenge

For Super Bowl LIX, Fetch set out to turn its national ad into a live event to grow our user base and increase awareness of Fetch. The ad would direct viewers to download and open the Fetch app during the game, and step into a live giveaway paying out $10,000 a second. An estimated 120 million people would see the ad. Fetch had never built anything at this scale before, didn’t know if 500,000 or 20 million people would show up, and had 103 days to design an experience that could hold either way, with no prior version of this product to learn from.

Engineering was standing up a temporary “takeover mode” from scratch as a separate layer that would fully replace the normal app the moment it activated. My job was to direct the creative around the UX. I had to consider what someone would see and feel in the seconds after the TV spot sent them into the app, how a live win would be revealed to millions of people at once, and how a passive broadcast audience could be turned into active participants, all of it needing to ship as one experience, on a deadline that couldn’t move, coordinated across engineering, our agency partner Monks, and Fetch’s marketing and executive teams.

The Approach

I started by concepting the narrative arc for the event, storyboarding each sequence, and defining how the three main moments, the intro, the live win reveal, and an in-stream reaction system, would work together as one story instead of three disconnected pieces. I then delegated production on secondary sequences, keeping the two highest-stakes moments, the intro and the winner reveal, in my own hands so nothing critical was a step removed from the vision.

The intro was the first thing anyone saw after the TV spot, so it had the job of telling people, instantly, what kind of experience they’d just opened. I built it around two of Fetch’s Pointling characters discovering a lone briefcase, knocking it over, and revealing it’s full of cash, the same curiosity-rewarded-by-discovery loop that runs through Fetch’s core product, compressed into eight seconds, before handing off into our CEO kicking off the broadcast live. For the reaction system, I designed a set of football-themed Pointmojis that Monks built into the livestream’s chat UI and that also became physical set decoration, printed on screens and props on set, a small design decision that gave a one-way broadcast a way to feel more like a community event.

Early on we had to make a call to build the animation in Lottie, not Rive, even though I’d been leading Fetch’s broader migration to Rive at the time. Rive was the better long-term platform, but this was a one-shot, no-second-take live event, and Lottie was the tool our team had the deepest track record with for fully animated, character-driven work. I prioritized proven execution over platform consistency, which meant overriding my own standing direction when the stakes called for it.

The Outcome

During the event, 2.3 million people watched the livestream concurrently, with viewership growing throughout, per Fetch’s own engineering team. Against the actual goal, 3.2 million people visited the Fetch app during the event window, driving 1.3 million new signups with an average view time of 9 minutes, figures independently confirmed in AWS’s published case study of the event.

The experience ran once, live, in front of the largest audience Fetch had ever put a product in front of, and no way to patch it mid-broadcast. It held, and it did what it was built to do: turn a single televised moment into the product’s largest acquisition event to date.