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Credit to Author: Brian Barrett| Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2020 12:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Brian Barrett<\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n A company you\u2019ve never heard of is spending millions of dollars to let you know it can make your online life easier.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s crop of Super Bowl ads<\/a> includes plenty of the usual suspects: expensive cars, cheap beers, big tech. But among the companies coughing up a reported $5.6 million<\/a> for 30 seconds of Big Game glory is one name most people have never heard of, selling a product that many don\u2019t know exists: Dashlane, an app that manages your passwords.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that password management is entirely novel. Dashlane has been around since 2012; its leading competitors, 1Password and LastPass, are even older. And security experts have long urged<\/a> the use of a dedicated app to create and keep track of secure passwords for you. Still, Dashlane\u2019s not exactly Budweiser. It does, though, want to be something like the Budweiser of internet safety.<\/p>\n No one enjoys having to remember their passwords, and nearly everyone has had at least one of them compromised; data breach repository Have I Been Pwnd<\/a> counts over 9 billion exposed accounts. \u201cIt\u2019s a universal problem, but the category\u2019s still very small and niche,\u201d says Dashlane chief marketing officer Joy Howard. \u201cSo we set out to create a category-defining brand in the space.\u201d<\/p>\n Dashlane already has password management credibility; it\u2019s one of WIRED\u2019s favorites<\/a>. For now, that\u2019s still something like being a big shot in a regional bowling league. But with each new corporate breach, and each so-called credential stuffing attack<\/a> that punishes password reuse, the general sense that there must be a better way continues to grow. And so Dashlane\u2019s Super Bowl ad isn\u2019t just a bet on Dashlane. It\u2019s a bet that something as arcane as password management is poised to go mainstream.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is what we set out to do, take it out of this dark wonky space and into something that\u2019s a no-brainer,\u201d Howard says. \u201cIt\u2019s a different time now. People are much more receptive to this kind of solution than they were before.\u201d<\/p>\n Investors certainly think so. Dashlane can afford a Super Bowl spot thanks to a $110 million funding round last spring. Last fall, 1Password took in $200 million of outside money. And in December, two private equity companies acquired<\/a> LastPass developer LogMeIn for $4.3 billion. One last big number: In 2018, research firm Grand View Research estimated that password management would be a $2 billion-a-year market by 2025. Password management is also what you might call a sticky business: Once you\u2019re locked into one company, there\u2019s not much incentive to switch. In fact, doing so can be a real hassle, since it requires resetting all those passwords all over again.<\/p>\n Those high-flying numbers might sound suspect given that so many of these services, including Dashlane, offer a version of their product for free. But Howard says the company has a high conversion rate; the $5 Dashlane plan includes a VPN and \u201cdark web monitoring\u201d for identity-theft protection. Besides, if there\u2019s a chance for your brand to become the one that's synonymous with the entire product category\u2014the Google or the Kleenex or the Taser of web security\u2014a Super Bowl ad starts to make perfect sense.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can see why a brand like this would go to the Super Bowl. You\u2019re going for the biggest punch in terms of audience. Often we\u2019re looking at 100 million-plus\u201d viewers, says Derek Rucker, a marketing professor at Northwestern University and co-instructor of the annual Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review. \u201cIf you\u2019re trying to get a lot of people familiar with the category or a brand you don\u2019t know, the Super Bowl has a tremendous tactical advantage in doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n The Dashlane ad accomplishes that, at least in the 60-second cut that the company released online ahead of the game. All that stands behind a moderately scruffy guy and heaven is remembering the answers to a series of password question prompts. It\u2019s funny! And more important, it\u2019s relatable, tidily conveying both the pain point and the solution.<\/p>\n