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The Super Bowl Ad Formula

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The Super Bowl is the biggest high wire act in marketing. The media alone costs $7 million for a 30 second spot to reach an audience of more than 100 million people.

So this is when marketers pull out all the stops. And yet they also tend to play it safe by following tried-and-true conventions. You don’t want to mess up on a stage that large.

It some ways, it represents the creative paradox marketers face every day — trying to follow a winning formula without becoming too formulaic.

That leads to the clichés we all recognize — nostalgia, celebrity, cute animals. Every once in a while, brands completely break the mold. In 2022, Coinbase famously threw out the whole playbook for a bouncing QR code. But by and large, Super Bowl ads follow the formula.

And yet, there’s always room to question conventional wisdom. Sometimes conventional wisdom is more convention than wisdom.

The celebrity cameo trope is a case in point. System1 released research last year that found that ads featuring “brand characters” significantly outscored “celebrity cameo” ads. Yet only 10% of ads use them.

In their study, 39% of Super Bowl ads featured celebrities and scored 2.7 out of 5 in brand impact. In contract, ads featuring brand characters scored 3.8 out of 5.

In 2023, M&Ms ran Super Bowl ads with both approaches. Early in the game, a celebrity ad with Maya Rudolph scored a low 1 out of 5. Later in the game, a brand character ad with the M&M spokescandies scored a 4.8 out of 5.

System 1 terms these types of ads with brand characters in branded situations “fluent devices.” An example is the Snickers “you’re not you when you’re hungry” set-up. They found that fluent devices like these are more likely to drive appeal, brand recognition, and commercial impact.

As Jon Evans, CMO at System1, put it:

“Almost 20% of viewers leave Super Bowl ads not being able to recall what brand the ad was for. This is causing serious wastage.”

New Podcast Conversation

I had one of my favorite podcast conversations recently on “Call to Action” — with Giles Edwards, founder of Gasp! and co-author of How Brands Blow. Really enjoyed chatting with a kindred spirit about all things marketing and why we need our sense of humor more than ever. You can listen here or find “Call to Action” on all the usual podcast spots.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a Super Bowl cartoon I drew way back in 2003:

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-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.