The (Admittedly Rare) Business Case for Committing a Zillion Dollars to a Super Bowl Ad

Maybe it's time to make your brand famous

First, a memory test: Close your eyes. No cheating. Can you remember five ads (out of the 50+ that aired) from this year’s Super Bowl? Now imagine you didn’t work in advertising, and spent most of the game with friends, probably tipsy. Elite trivia team captains would be lucky to name one.

So you can understand a CFO’s skepticism when asked if they should green-light $8 million on a 30-second ad that will, statistically, be all-but-forgotten by the end of the same business year.

That said, we’ve entered an era where evolutions in marketing technology have sent us on a Holy Grail quest to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. This comically specific targeting seems to respond to intimate conversations you just had with friends, paired with the AI-ification of hyper-customized creative assets.

The Optimization Era promises efficiency

Our obsession with last-mile efficiency has made us forget how brand-building actually works. It wrongfully over-attributes marketing credit to the final click. And because it’s hard to measure the subconscious. (The folks at System1 and IPA have been trying to open the world’s eyes to this case.)

So, why would you buy a zillion-dollar TV ad? One word: Fame.

The Super Bowl is a commitment to building brand fame, and a brave vote from a brand team that they want the 10x efficiency multiplier that fame campaigns get over awareness campaigns, according to IPA Databank.

The problem is that because of the financial and political capital that most brand leaders have to spend convincing their teams and boards to buy the Super Bowl ad itself, they tend to under-commit on the campaign itself, where Super Bowls are “won” and “lost.”

The result is that the creative lacks the commitment that the ad buy did.

The Commitment Commandments

With that, here’s a completely non-exhaustive list of commitments that make a Super Bowl campaign worth the zillion dollars you have to commit to secure the spot:

• Commit to an audience that is smaller than 120 million Americans. Our math brains want to make the “cost per viewer” as low as possible to justify our massive investment. But trying to delight 120 million people with something unexpected or interesting is a truly impossible task, which is why we end up with generic, slapstick, celebrity-crutched ideas. Pick the growth audience you actually want to delight—they’ll still be in the tens of millions, but you can free yourself from the idea that everyone’s supposed to love your idea. For example: Liquid Death chose to commit to an audience who gets and loves sarcasm and didn’t worry about the backlash of those who might misconstrue “drinking on the job” as actually getting drunk at work. The latter were never going to buy Liquid Death in the first place.
• Commit to the emotional takeaway. System1’s research says highly emotional ads not only stick in your mind longer, but they drive long-term market share growth. Do you want people to laugh? Cry? Feel angry about an enemy? Feel surprised enough to lean in? You don’t have time or space to do all of these things in 30 distracted seconds. Pick one emotion and filter your decisions through that. For example: Lay’s checked every “nostalgia” box with their “Little Farmer” spot: a determined girl, return-to-simplicity storytelling about a potato, some Juno-coded folk music and of course a comforting, nostalgic Americana snack—Lay’s chips.
• Commit to the long-term. Some Super Bowl spots are like butterflies—they’re extremely beautiful, but dead in a day. If you’re going to spend this much money on a Super Bowl, make sure it’s either leveraging the platform or distinctive assets you’ve been cultivating as a brand, or using the stage to plant seeds for the brand you want to build. For example: Budweiser’s commitment to Clydesdales, Häagen-Dazs’ commitment to savoring slowly, Doritos’ (re-)commitment to crashing the Super Bowl, Dunkin’s commitment to Ben Affleck.
• Commit to getting out of the way. Super Bowl ad postmortems have a consistent killer: death by a thousand fingerprints. At most brands, hundreds of people have to touch the campaign in some form of another. And whether out of anxiety or a desire to tell your kid “that was my idea,” it’s hard for people to help themselves from a little note here, and a little note there. You can usually tell which ideas were stewarded by small, mighty teams that kept the idea fingerprint-free. You can usually remember the ads too, because they were simpler. For example: Coinbase’s iconic commitment to the bouncing QR code says a lot more about who got out of the way than who added good notes. The fact that they committed to a 60-second spot is proof alone.

Realistically, most brands can’t justify the cost of a Super Bowl ads. And a lot of other brands just don’t believe in playing the fame game.

But if you’re going to fight the exhausting fights to commit to zillion bucks to have your brand show up at the Super Bowl, you should also be able to say out loud what else you’re committing to.