The Story Behind The #BrokersAreBetter Super Bowl Commercial

Watching the Super Bowl, you may have seen a number of oddities: the resurrection of a peanut as an infant, the tattooed inside of a popular rapper’s head, Google’s plea to be the hub for all your elderly relatives’ memories, and, on top of it all, a cheeky spar between mortgage lenders.

Quicken Loans, the Detroit-based mortgage provider, had an ad that featured Hawaiian actor Jason Momoa reveal his ‘true’ self, all while explaining the values of Quicken’s Rocket Mortgage product. Par for the course with Super Bowl ads, until United Wholesale Mortgage’s advert aired. Throwing shade at it its competitor with the line: “Playing with rockets is great when you’re a kid, but when it’s time to get a mortgage, you quickly realize a rocket is complicated and expensive,” United promoted its FindAMortgageBroker.com website, which points potential customers towards a host of brokers local to themselves, before closing its ad with the #brokersarebetter hashtag.

Speaking to The Detroit News about the joke, United CEO Mat Ishbia said: “I don’t think we attacked (Rocket Mortgage); we had fun with it … I think it’s going to grow their business just like it’s going to grow ours. I think (Quicken founder) Dan Gilbert and (CEO) Jay Farmer are going to laugh when they see it. They won’t like it enough to chip in with the cost. The reality is we’re friendly competitors.”

Being a wholesale lender, United gains customers exclusively from its brokers, where as Quicken engages with both brokers and its own marketing efforts. In a call with deBanked, United’s Chief Marketing Officer, Sarah DeCiantis, explained that this was one of the main motivators behind the ad. Noting that for local, independent brokers it can be a struggle to compete with behemoth retail lenders, DeCiantis said that the ad was an answer to the question of ‘How do we allow them to get out there?’ “Retail are amazing at marketing and customer retention, so we try to do what we can to put [independent brokers] on the same playing field because they don’t have the same budget.”

And with only 30 seconds to express this, the challenge was on — not to mention how such ads are estimated to cost $5.6 million. “So much thought goes into every frame, every second,” remarked DeCiantis, who said she was proud of the final product. “We’ve gotten over 75,000 searches on the website just in the first few days after the ad.”

The high profile decision to purchase Super Bowl air time comes during what looks like will be a big year for United, with it planning to add an additional 3,000 employees to its already 5,000-strong staff in its Pontiac headquarters. Despite this, according to Ishbia the focus is still on the local: “If a consumer goes through an independent mortgage broker it will be faster, easier and more affordable than going through a retail lender or mega bank.” From his point of view, it just makes more sense to go independent, it isn’t rocket science.

Brendan Garrett was a Reporter at deBanked.