Five considerations for advertisers embarking on a Super Bowl journey
Key takeaways from Mano’s annual Super Bowl Compass, in partnership with WARC.
WARC (short for World Advertising Research Center) is the leading authority on marketing effectiveness. WARC provides their community of 75,000 marketers in 100 markets with best practices, evidence and insights to make more effective marketing and advertising decisions.
The Super Bowl is the most-watched broadcast and the biggest advertising bonanza of the year. Some people call it the promised land of creativity; others simply can't get their head around it. But as a matter of fact, it’s the only time people avoid mid-game bathroom breaks and actively seek out the most absurd commercials that make them both laugh and cringe.
With an audience that reaches as many as 100 million viewers around the world, the stakes are high — but the cost of a 30-second slot during the game is even higher. With time slots reaching $5.6M, the Super Bowl is an excellent but expensive opportunity for brands to gain a massive reach and get people buzzing during the Big Game and beyond.
Year after year, the advertising industry tries to map out the basic mechanisms of Super Bowl commercials, yet there is practically no creative recipe for winning the race of consumer attention during this extremely cluttered period. So how can brands make sure they won't miss the mark by spending too much money on something that might not work?
This report explores five fundamental considerations for advertisers embarking on a Super Bowl journey, based on the analysis of the 48 brand campaigns from Super Bowl LIV in 2020. Combining a content analysis approach and social monitoring research, these reflections can help advertisers understand the determining factors for successful activation for their Super Bowl LV 2021 campaigns.
1. Understanding what success looks like
If there is a success parameter during the Super Bowl, it’s the results of the USA Today Ad Meter. However, advertisers tend to give too much weight to the result of the Ad Meter, when it actually only serves as an indicator of consumers' likeability. A good position in the Ad Meter ranking doesn't necessarily manifest the interest of the brand’s target audience, even though it’s a great organic boost for media coverage filling the headlines following Super Bowl Sunday. Nevertheless, the Ad Meter should not be the end goal, but a means to an end (in this case, earned PR post-Big Game).
Therefore, brands’ KPIs for the Super Bowl should mimic any other commercial event — they should be connected to the business goals, and not the other way around (as it is often the case). There’s no magic formula to win the Super Bowl, because every brand should decide what their finishing line is and how it will help them grow.
In that sense, there are several other essential KPIs that tend to be overlooked because of the mainstream popularity of the Ad Meter, yet are a powerful measure of Super Bowl campaign and brand success — including share of voice and share of engagement. Some of the most effective ads spark engagement and a spike in consumer conversations, both online and offline. However as our study shows, these ads don’t always make it to the top of the Ad Meter ranking.
Top 5 performers according to SoV, SoE and Ad meter:
2. Mobilizing the audience with a clear CTA
Brands who set their sights on winning the game as the most mentioned brand should consider including a clear CTA in their commercial.
This year, brands that allowed the audience to participate in their commercials scored among the top three. T-Mobile and Rocket Mortgage relied on sweepstakes to activate the audience on social media, while Olay’s #makespaceforwomen mobilized their audience in fundraising efforts. One way or another, consumers had a meaningful reason for and saw value in engaging with those brands.
A successful hashtag strategy relies on the same mechanisms, so brands who want to amplify their online presence and drive conversations, especially on social media, need to create an intuitive connection between their campaign hashtag and a CTA that will mobilise their audience. In 2020, a best in class example of this strategy was performed by Doritos and their #coolranchdance challenge on Tik Tok, which earned 7.2B interactions.
Doritos Cool Ranch Dance
3. Setting the right tone
The Super Bowl is primarily a happy-go-lucky type of occasion. People expect to be entertained and are thirsty for a great comedy filled with hilarious puns after a year of waiting.
Using humour is a powerful technique to create an emotional appeal, rekindle brand love and increase the chance of going viral. And that appears to be why 80% of all advertisers in Super Bowl 2020 relied on humour as the main driver for TOV to reach the top of Ad Meter ranking.
Yet for every rule, there is an exception. With its Loretta ad, Google stood out among a seamless sea of easy humour as the only spot that relied on an emotional tonality and reached the top of the Ad Meter, share of mentions, share of engagement, as well as news coverage rankings.
4. Letting the stars shine
With big budgets come big celebrities, and 73% of all Super Bowl commercials featured high-profile celebrities in Super Bowl 2020. According to our analysis, Brands turn to two different strategies when recruiting celebrities for their Super Bowl commercials.
In the hero approach, the creative idea is built upon the celebrities’ artistic or political recognition, with some of their most famous moments being repurposed in the narrative of the spot. This was the strategy employed by Jeep and their Groundhog Day commercial with Bill Murray.
Hero Approach:
Olay Killer Skin (Hero Approach):
Whereas the vehicle approach comes into play when the creative idea is already in place and brands are seeking ways to amplify the key message through celebrities that align well with their DNA. Olay’s #makespaceforwomen campaign represents this approach, whereas their 2019 spot with Sarah Michelle Gellar explored the hero strategy instead.
Vehicle Approach:
Despite the vehicle approach being more popular among brands during the 2020 Super Bowl — with 63% of spots featuring a celeb using that strategy — the brands that managed to decode the role of their chosen celebrity through a hero approach scored higher in the Ad Meter ranking, and had a much greater share of voice and engagement than those who limited the celebrity appearance to amplifying their creative. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the hero approach comes with the risk of falling into the celebrity-pitfall, where the celebrity endorsement overrules the brand’s message and hinders brand attribution.
Sabra Super Bowl (Vehicle Approach):
5. Supporting good causes during the Big Game
The Super Bowl provides people with the opportunity to escape from their daily hustle and enjoy the adrenaline rush of the game, while snacking and spending quality time with loved ones. This setting is a very important consideration for brands to be aware of, since it has an essential implication on the preferred tonality of commercials airing during the Big Game. Compared to fun and light-hearted ads, political engagement or cause related brand efforts typically perform poorly during this occasion, with only 16% of the Big Game audience recalling this type of spots. (1)
During Super Bowl 2020, only 6 out of 48 brands decided to take a cause-related stand, but only a half of those explicitly mentioned their efforts in the commercials. Consumers were therefore able to notice their cause-related initiatives only if they actively sought information about the brands. This implies that brands tend to stay away from any political engagement to avoid being the subject of controversy.
In particular, commercials focused on topics such as LGBTQ+, racial diversity or sustainability performed poorly especially on YouTube, with the dislike ratio much higher than in non-cause-related campaigns.
However, success largely depends on the approach to brand activism and the cause brands decide to step in. In Super Bowl 2020, female empowerment seemed to be the winning cause. With their Make Space For Women campaign, Olay encouraged young women to choose STEM as a career path and initiated a social media fundraising endeavor, donating 1$ to STEM for every hashtag tweeted. This campaign placed Olay as the second most talked about brand in 2020’s Super Bowl and the 7th most engaging brand, driving a significantly better position compared to other “brand stands.”
On the other hand, Michelobs Ultra Pure Gold’s ad that promised to transition six square feet of farmland to organic agriculture (if consumers buy their 6-pack) didn’t perform as expected, despite a peak in conversations around sustainability preceding the Super Bowl. The ad ranked last in share of voice.
Should brands still pursue a cause-driven spot in the Super Bowl? And if so, how? The key lies in consumer participation. While consumers appreciate brands trying to make the world a better place, their involvement should be as low as possible. During the Big Game, consumers will support brands on their cause-related endeavours, but don’t want to engage in activities beyond hashtag usage. And even less so, when they’re required to acquire a product to contribute to a cause. This finding can be translated to any other brand activist effort: tying commercial benefits to brand acts will always be perceived as opportunistic and unauthentic.
(1) Friedman, W. Does anyone remember the Super Bowl Ads? Media Post. Link.
Conclusion
2020 has been full of world-shifting moments that have brought out strong emotions across the globe. In the face of events like the pandemic, the Presidential election, racial injustice movements, riots, job losses and quarantines, American society has never been more divided and declining trust in formerly respected sources of information.
The first decision that advertisers at Super Bowl LV will need to make will be to choose between taking a strong stand on politics and the current events, or offering an escape from the distress of the current year. We can predict that most advertisers in next year’s Super Bowl will choose between two roads: either they will take a strong stand on politics and current events, or they will offer an escape from the distress of 2020 and contribute to the light-hearted tone that characterises the Super Bowl.
However, there are many more routes brands can take with their creative ideas that are not necessarily mutually exclusive and can bind together divergent perspectives. No matter which road brands choose, they need to understand the unprecedented cultural context and assess the above considerations in order to be geared and successful at the Big Game.
Want to chat Superbowl? Or have another brand defining moment you’re in pursuit of winning? Reach out to Jakob@hellomano.com for a complimentary consult today.
