For 30 seconds, a significant part of America stopped and prayed. Then many viewers opened their phones and downloaded Hallow.
Hallow, a prayer and meditation app, aired a Super Bowl commercial featuring a simple prayer led by actor Mark Wahlberg followed by an invitation to join the app’s Pray40 Lenten challenge.
That single commercial, which aired in 14 markets, led to Hallow’s largest spike in downloads.
That is until three days later. On Ash Wednesday, Wahlberg, and Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in “The Chosen,” promoted the prayer app on Fox and Friends.
After the segment, Hallow saw its largest spike in downloads ever, beating out the Super Bowl promo.
’30 seconds to talk to Jesus’
Alex Jones, the CEO and co-founder of Hallow, shared with Our Sunday Visitor that the app’s leaders took a leap of faith with the Super Bowl and Fox appearances in an attempt to boldly invite viewers to partake in the app’s Lenten challenge.
“We never really thought about a Super Bowl commercial seriously. The only thing that put it at the top of our minds was the timing this year, since the Super Bowl fell on the Sunday immediately before Ash Wednesday which has always been the largest day of the year for us,” said Jones. “With the Super Bowl’s timing, that led us to think, ‘wow this would be a crazy opportunity since we’re a small startup, this would be a huge for us.'”
Taking a leap of faith, they decided to do something abnormal. Instead of promoting the app, they decided to give America the opportunity to pray.
“After praying and thinking about what we could do, we decided that Jesus should do the heavy lifting in the ad,” said Jones. “We decided that we shouldn’t try to push anything and just give America 30 seconds to talk to Jesus.”
By Ash Wednesday, over two million people had downloaded the app with over a million users joining the Pray40 challenge. These metrics catapulted Hallow, a company with 80 employees, to be the #1 app in the app store, surpassing corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Temu, a shopping website that aired six ads during the Super Bowl.
But the success, they say, does not come from Hallow’s advertising strategy.
Pray40
“People are really hungry for Christ and there’s this big opportunity for us, the Church, to reach out to people and show them this incredible spirituality that the Church has and invite people into the Church, to help them find a radical life-changing purpose, and show them all of the beauty of the Church and the sacraments” said Jones. “I think people are hungry for Christ and we are so excited to see how people are engaging with the content.”
Already, Hallow has seen users engage with the content. Four days into the Pray40 Challenge, which highlights the story of Jesuit priest Father Walter Ciszek, the priest’s autobiography, “He Leadeth Me,” which documents his mission and imprisonment in Soviet labor camps, became the top selling book on Amazon.
“At the beginning of Hallow, people were worried that people using this app are going to stop attending Church or replace scripture reading with the app, or stop sitting in silence,” said Jones. “However, our lowest usage day is on Sundays every week because people are attending Mass, and then usage spikes back up on Monday.”
To Jones, these metrics affirm that Hallow is fulfilling its mission — to support people in their faith journey.
“What we try to do is help people pray, which brings you into a relationship with God,” said Jones. “The book being number one on Amazon and the app being number one in the app store shows that we’re just a small part of people’s faith life and are succeeding in inspiring people to explore and dive deeper into the fullness of their faith, which is what we have always hoped to do.”
