Part of the fun of Super Bowl Sunday is watching the ads — which go for about $5.5 million per 30-second pop. Now that the dust has settled, Brandon Chicotsky, Ph.D., an assistant professor of professional practice in marketing in the Neeley School of Business, weighed in on the winners, losers and trends from this year’s big game.
Which ads were the “winners” and why?
BC: When firms consider “winning” with large advertising expenditures, there are two common considerations. The first is branding ROI, which is slightly more abstract and offers indirect benefits, such as name recognition, message salience or associations that help customers establish a relationship to increase their loyalty, brand evangelism and customer lifetime value. There is quantifiable data to help determine branding effectiveness of any campaign, which include sentiment scoring, social monitoring and second-screen activity (real-time likes, pins, shares, posts, hashtags, comments, etc.).
The second consideration is direct revenues and follow-on purchase behavior generated from the campaign over a period of time meant to correlate with the ad placement. This consideration is most commonly associated with a product launch and sometimes extends for a full year after the ad campaign.
Despite limited ROI metrics available at this time, we can determine a few “winners” informed by marketing reviews.
Mercari Inc., a Japanese-based online clothing marketplace, employed actors featuring real-life roommates and couples. This casting aimed to achieve “authenticity,” but may have been more logistically reasonable considering production constraints related to the pandemic. Either way, the company has self-reported increases in new purchases, repeat purchases and site visits.
DraftKings Inc. aired two 15-second ads and generated on-site engagement for its $55 million contestant betting pool for the game. The company could only accept wagers in one state in 2019. Currently, 14 states offer statutory or judicial legal clearance for wagers, and many online users likely developed workarounds to engage in betting. Real-time engagement and actionable prompts from ads such as DraftKings may foreshadow future advertising approaches.
Amazon’s “Alexa Body” featuring Michael B. Jordan has captured zeitgeist interest for the spot portraying a jealous husband clumsily working to prevent his wife from engaging with the house’s anthropomorphized Alexa smart speaker assistant in the form of an all-too-personalized Michael B. Jordan. More than 100 million smart speaker devices with the Alexa assistant technology have been sold since last year. This number is trending upward and has been widely deemed a sound bet for Amazon to place a national-reaching ad with follow-on online marketing appeal.
What about the losers?
BC: “Losers” seem to fall to the ads awash with computer-generated imagery such as “Doritos 3D and Flat Matthew McConaughey,” which prompted comparisons to last year’s heavily critiqued Rocket Mortgage Super Bowl ad featuring Jason Momoa stripping off outer layers of skin to reveal an extremely skinny persona. Plenty of detractors have begun beating back against provocations against body dysmorphia, obesity or other concerns tangentially related to Doritos’ buyership communities.
The “Paramount+ Expedition” advertisement has been disregarded — which can be worse than derision — due to its inward-facing humor and lack of resonance with viewers. The ad aimed to announce the rebranding of “CBS All Access” as Paramount+, which takes place in March of this year and will attempt to compete with established streaming platforms such as Netflix. The ad’s heavy emphasis on computer-generated images may have been too “heady” for viewers or altogether too business-centric rather than consumer-focused.
How did the pandemic change advertisers’ approach?
BC: In the marketing communications industry, last year’s Super Bowl was known for setting the expenditure record. The big game was hosted by Fox and garnered $448.7 million in advertising placements. That amount was up from the previous two years (2019 with CBS and 2018 with NBC), with each garnering approximately $340 million. Viewership has been declining since its peak in 2015 at 114.4 million, with most marketing commentators pointing at the emergence of streaming media and less ritual gathering behavior among youth populations as the culprits. Nevertheless, this year’s Super Bowl ad expenditures will roughly equal last year’s total.
While the pandemic may not have caused drastic spending changes, the tone of ads may have factored the national mood and other broad-sweeping assumptions about viewership. There was also a running storyline in marketing news hubs about CBS’s lethargic pace of ad space sales; it took about 60 days longer to fill spots than preceding years. One of the speculated reasons for the stalwart absences was a “wait and see” regarding the newform marketplace taking shape.
Do you think the advertisers that chose to sit out this Super Bowl made the wise choice?
BC: Notable absences were previous Super Bowl stalwarts Budweiser, Coke and Pepsi. In the parent brand’s first absence in 37 years, Budweiser opted to direct funds toward a vaccine-awareness ad campaign instead and ran brand extension ads such as “Bud Light Legends.” Pepsico Inc. did sponsor the halftime show, and one of its brands, Mountain Dew, ran an ad.
Other notable absences include Kia and Hyundai Motor America, despite last year’s acclaimed placement featuring its “Remote Smart Parking Assist” in Bostonian themes. Marketers are speculating that vehicle launches operated on a different schedule this year, due in part to COVID-19-related supply chain adjustments. By obvious measure, their absence was a calculated decision, but may have cleared the way for less expected entrants to have a more salient placement, such as Cadillac’s promotion of its all-electric LYRIQ with the “ScissorHandsFree” ad. Among this year’s first-time Super Bowl advertising entrants were UberEats, Oatly, Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., Klarna, Vroom Inc., Dexcom and Duke Cannon Supply Co. (Dr. Squatch).
For Budweiser, Coke and Pepsi, among other multinational firms, there are likely new issues at hand regarding departmental diffusions that once segmented inventory flow and marketing, which now may need to better correspond to optimize online delivery systems with online marketing in a post-COVID era. Their absence this year may have to do with fiduciary oversight and greater organizational imperatives involving a new landscape for product placement and delivery methods.
Do you have an all-time favorite Super Bowl ad?
BC: Reebok’s “Terry Tate Office Linebacker” has remained a “watercooler hit,” but my all-time favorite is more personal than contextualized in business. In 2002 Budweiser showed its famed Clydesdales walking across the Brooklyn Bridge into New York City. The majestic horses stopped, gazed at the ruined Manhattan skyline after the 9/11 attacks and respectfully bowed. It was the only time the commercial ever aired on television.