The numbers are in for Super Bowl XLVIII, a blow-out 43-8 win for the Seattle Seahawks over the Denver Broncos in gridiron’s grand final, and an average of 112.9 million viewers tuned in Feb. 2 for the football — and the ads.
More than 50 commercials aired during the contest, many of them teased online beforehand and replayed afterward through social media. What lessons can Australian advertisers garner from the big game?
“There is a calculus that goes into this,” says Jonathan Symonds, executive vice president of marketing for Ace Metrix, an advertising engagement measuring firm. “If you are going to spend $4 million for 30 seconds, you really do need to maximise your opportunity, and that’s why you are seeing so many of these brands really treat that single ad as a campaign. It’s digital, it’s social, it’s mobile — all those channels get aligned around those 30 seconds to try to make those seconds two weeks, three weeks or longer in terms of impact. It’s not one and done.”
There was also more fine-tuning in execution this year. “We saw a much better mastery of what the game represents,” Symonds says. “Call it consumer IQ, but advertisers were smarter. They didn’t make any faux pas, they didn’t turn over the creative to the mob, like Lincoln did last year, they didn’t go for so-over-the-top, polarizing humour like Go Daddy did last year. They played it a little bit safer, but they played it a little bit smarter.”
Safer meant less sizzle and more sobriety. “There weren’t any really sexy, exploitative commercials this year, any you wouldn’t want your kids to watch,” says Barbara Lippert, editor-in-large for MediaPost and a veteran Super Bowl ad watcher. “The only person taking clothes off was David Beckham — no women in bikinis.”
For a comparable sporting event in Australia, such as the AFL grand final, Symonds advises companies that the sporting spectacle “looks just like Australia in the same way a Super Bowl looks just like America, so to go out with things that are particularly cheeky, potentially polarising, those are risks but you should be calculated in your risks, because if you fail in that joke or don’t consider how your joke can get misinterpreted, your brand will suffer.”
But advertisers should take comfort that “there are so many paths to greatness,” Symonds adds. “Microsoft and Hyundai, totally different ways, and Radio Shack, totally different again. They did it with kids and animals for Doritos, and tear-jerkers with the Budweiser “Hero’s Welcome,” Heinz ketchup with humming a tune. Pretty simple. You don’t have to blow it up or go over the top to get to an audience.”
So which spots had everyone talking during and after the Super Bowl?
1. Budweiser “Puppy Love”: (Agency: Anomaly)
Why it worked: Cuteness
While the beer brand has used horses and dogs in ads before, this take on the friends-forever theme topped viewer surveys on Hulu, USA Today and other outlets as the most-loved commercial of the night. “They save the Clydesdales for this moment,” Symonds says, “and there’s probably a deep well of creative ideas for future years, but it was almost unfair. I mean, we knew from the get-go as soon as they put a puppy next to a Clydesdale? A puppy-Clydesdale mashup is a guarantee.”
2. Microsoft “Empowering”: (Agency: in-house)
Why it worked: Relatable emotion
“It’s really extraordinary what they were able to achieve if you really think about it,” Symonds says. “They ran a 60-second spot that covered a whole range of emotions. They were delivered very difficult blows, they were deaf, they were born without legs, they had ALS, but they were overcoming all of these things with technology, but subtly woven in there was Skype, was Windows, was Kinect, was Surface, all of these different products. Even for the casual viewer, you picked up on it. All of these are things you use in your every day life are applied to solve incredible problems. It was a product demo par excellence.”
3. Radio Shack “Good Bye ‘80s” (Agency: GSD&M)
Why it worked: Nostalgia
This pop-culture-reference-filled spot featuring cameos by Hulk Hogan, Alf, Erik Estrada, and US ‘80s ad icons the California Raisins, among others, used Gen X memories effectively. “I don’t think anybody expected that just based on where the brand is today and what the brand represents,” Symonds says. “They showed up as No. 3 on our list and that was, frankly, confirmed by a lot of other sources that the ad was just very clever and very effective, that this was not 1980’s Radio Shack and you need to give us another chance.”
4. Hyundai “Dad’s Sixth Sense” (Agency: Innocean USA)
Why it worked: Humour
A perennially accident-prone son and his overly protective father star in this “sneaky-good ad,” Symonds says. “It’s one of those where you watch and go, ‘That’s a really funny ad, I enjoyed that, and by the way, that braking thing is pretty cool,’ without realizing that you just got sold on automatic braking in the new Hyundai Genesis. It really did achieve what it intended to.”
5. Doritos “Cowboy Kid” (Agency: Goodby Silverstein & Partners)
Why it worked: Consumer input
For the 8th year, Doritos has made it a a public contest for a consumer-generated commercial to land in one of their two slots. One of the five finalists was even from Sydney. “They have won the Super Bowl 3 of the last 5 years,” Symonds says. “They were in the top five with their top ad this year and the top quarter with even their second-best ad. The reason they are that successful is they leave nothing to chance. They start with five ads and then they winnow that thing down over a period of 4 to 6 weeks and it’s a cage match because whatever emerges is guaranteed to be successful because there are more than a million people who have already vetted that content. It’s a very successful strategy for them to crowdsource these ads.”
6. Dannon Oikos Greek Yogurt “The Spill”
Why it worked: Anticipation
The Full House reunion of actors John Stamos, Bob Saget and Dave Coulier had been hyped in magazines and on talk shows in the weeks leading to the Super Bowl. It’s no surprise that longtime pitchman Stamos had a hand in the creative. “As we were thinking about a return to Super Bowl for 2014,” says Michael Neuwirth, Dannon’s senior director of public relations,
“We talked to John and he was needless to say very enthusiastic and at one point he did suggest the possibility of working with his buddies, so the idea was not in the advertising to do any thematic reference to their past work, but to bring the concept of their bromance to life in an updated contemporary way.”
7. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee “Seinfeld Reunion” (Production: Crackle In-house)
Why it didn’t work: Incongruity
It started a month ago with Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander pictured walking in front of Tom’s Diner in New York. What was that all about? In the end, reunion hopes were dashed as it was merely a teaser for an upcoming episode of Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. “The Seinfeld ad was a bit of a lead balloon,” says Barbara Lippert, editor-at-large for MediaPost. “To spend $4 million to promote an online series? And use the biggest venue ever on old-school network television? That’s a new world.”
8. Maserati “Strike” (Agency: Wieden+Kennedy)
Why it didn’t work: Ambiguity
A cinematic Beasts of the Southern Wild theme, complete with actress Quvenzhané Wallis, heralded luxe brand Maserati’s first foray into Super Bowl advertising. “The execution is where the rubber hits the road, and I think the execution here was a little flawed,” Symonds says. “To American consumers, it felt pretentious, and it’s a long way to go, 70 of the 90 seconds, to not know what they are talking about. Maserati wanted to do the sneak attack, like they said in their ad, and I think it actually did them a disservice.”
9. Axe Peace “Make Love, Not War” (Agency: Bartle Bogle Hegarty)
Why it didn’t work: Too short
The version of the ad released early on YouTube and featured here is the full 60-second commercial. The 30-second version of that ad, which viewers saw during the Super Bowl, “felt a little rushed,” Symonds says. “Creatively, the concept was sound to move away from ‘I’m just a teenage boy’ and be broader in terms of its appeal, but they just didn’t give themselves enough runway in terms of the ad. That was the failing there.”
10. Go Daddy “I Quit” (Agency: Deutsch New York)
Why it did and didn’t work:
Instead of a pin-up model in a bikini, this web company’s first spot featured 36-year-old Gwen Dean, a real-life machine operator, quitting her job on national television in order to start her own business making puppets. On the one hand, “we applaud them,” Symonds says, “Their scores were better than they were last year. Subjectively we applaud the new creative strategy. Having said that, what they are trying to do is difficult. They are trying to be relevant in an environment where people just aren’t focused on domain names, business websites or building their own websites. The Super Bowl is not a great venue for selling those types of products.”
11. Newcastle Brown Ale “If We Made It”: (Agency: Droga5)
Why it worked:
This series of pre-Super Bowl ads deliberately played on the fact that Newcastle Brown Ale had never intended to advertise during the game and used comedy to captivate its audience. “Newcastle just leveraged the event as best they could and they did a good job,” Symonds says. “They got lots of social media attention around that, so that’s good for them and they should consider that a win. It was a clever approach. Now that they’ve done it, it’s going to be harder to replicate that.”
“Teaser for the Trailer ad”
Anna Kendrick “Behind the Scenes” ad:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/wgbWvV6Oa4o
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