- The ultra-discount retailer Temu bought an eye-popping three $7 million Super Bowl ad spots.
- The big takeaway from the investment: Everyone's saying "Temu" incorrectly.
If your company's name meant "team up," how would you pronounce it?
Obviously the answer is "teh-moo."
That's the buzzy takeaway about Temu, the online ultra-discount retailer that either found a coupon for Super Bowl ads or broke open the piggy bank in airing three $7 million spots during Sunday night's game.
Though not quite a rebranding, this pronunciation is new for the two-year-old e-commerce site, which aired its first (single) Super Bowl commercial last year. In that ad, Temu is clearly (and predictably) pronounced "tee-moo."
The change appears to have rolled out in video ads weeks before the Big Game. It caught the eye of some on social media, causing one commenter on Reddit to wonder if they were "having a fever dream."
Of course, making 100 million sports fans and Swifties question their sanity is sure to leave an impression.
Search interest in Temu exploded on Sunday night as viewers checked their phones for more information about how to "shop like a billionaire" and how to pronounce the name.
Those results make the estimated $21 million look like money well spent for Temu's parent company, PDD Holdings.
And if it feels like Temu is everywhere you look these days, it's going to get even bigger: JPMorgan analysts have projected that PDD will drop $3 billion marketing the brand this year.
With its big spending on raising awareness of Temu, PDD hopes to challenge Amazon's dominance in the US the same way it upset Alibaba's apple cart in China.