Is a great Super Bowl ad any different than a great ad per se? Asking this question to marketers elicits a variety of answers. Still, those who have practiced their craft on advertising’s biggest stage know there’s a different standard for Super Bowl ads, even if there’s not always a common thread. There’s a sense of urgency, amplified if the game is being used to launch a product.
“Theatricality is what makes a great ad, whatever time of year it is. Companies [clients] just don’t always allow the same level of risk or funding the rest of the year that they do with a Super Bowl ad,” said Eric Hirshberg, chief creative officer and president at Deustch, Los Angeles, who’s created Super Bowl ads for GM, Expedia and Mitsubishi Motors.
“Ideally, you want a simple message that is delivered in a surprising and entertaining way, whatever time of year it is. But there is no denying that there is a real thirst for broad entertainment value when it comes to a Super Bowl ad. It’s not a time to be subtle or make people think too hard.”
Super Bowl advertisers generally fall into three categories:
Perennials, established brands that have advertised in the Super Bowl for so long that their absence would elicit concern about their financial well-being, and possibly leave the door open for competitors. Anheuser-Busch, which has Super Bowl beer category exclusivity through 2012, leads this group, which also includes Visa, Pepsi and FedEx.
Occasionals, big brands that can afford to pay the high cost of Super Bowl freight, but don’t do it annually. Many car bands fall into this group, as do studios with big theatrical releases, or other marketers seeking a big launching pad. “G2 is a brand-new proposition and the Super Bowl was the best place for us to show that we are where sports is and get across our point that today’s athlete is an athlete 24/7,” said Jeff Urban, senior vice president of sports marketing at Gatorade, which is running a Super Bowl ad to support the introduction of its new lower-calorie G2 Gatorade formula.
Companies that see a Super Bowl ad as a coming of age for their maturating brand; a way to show consumers and competitors that they have arrived. Under Armour is a prime example, as is Salesgenie.
“It’s about getting noticed,” said Howe Burch, executive vice president of integrated marketing at TBC Advertising, Baltimore, who engineered Fila’s one and only Super Bowl ad in 1997. “That’s why you will always see marketers using animals, off-color humor and buxom women in their Super Bowls ads — they get attention.”
Burch said if he had it to do over, he would not have put Fila into Super Bowl XXXI.
“We got caught up in the aura and the spectacle,” he said. “At the time, we believed it was a good platform to launch a shoe, but now I think that money could have been better spent elsewhere. It is also very easy to get lost in the competitive [ad] clutter because everyone is trying to do something outrageous. You have to question whether that is really benefiting your brand in the long run.”
“It’s different because it is the only time of year when you get shushed during the commercial break,” said Jonathan Paley, managing director at DCode, which counts the NFL, Modell’s and ESPN among its sports clients. “People want to be entertained, laugh and laugh hard, and if they don’t, chances are it has not been a big success. Some brands will actually stay away just because of the fear of a low-rated ad. That doesn’t happen anywhere else.”
Picking favorites from the 2,000 or so ads that have aired over the past 41 Super Bowls is tantamount to asking an art critic what his favorite piece is at The Met, or a mother of eight which one is her favorite child.
Hirshberg likes Monster.com’s striking ad, in which children aspire to jobs that will force them to “claw my way up to middle management” or be “forced into early retirement.” Burch prefers the FedEx “Apology” ad, in which a screen crawl tells viewers the FedEx ad will not air, because the wrong delivery company was used to ship the commercial. “It’s true to the brand and it probably cost $20,000 to make,” he said. “That makes it a classic in its own right.”
We’ve picked our own dozen — prime and putrid — on the next two pages. The thing about advertising, especially Super Bowl advertising, is that just as with art, cooking and sex, everyone’s an expert.
