How to score a touchdown with your Super Bowl ad

In the US, we all typically get excited about the Super Bowl — whether it’s for the love of the game, to root for your home or chosen team, or for some, to simply watch the lineup of blockbuster ads.

We think of ads that make it into the Super Bowl lineup as highly successful and creative content — after all, it’s a huge investment to get your brand in there. But not all Super Bowl ads are successful.

In this article, we’ll break down some examples of the ones who did it well (and not so well) and which factors you should focus on to increase the chances of making your ad a touchdown.

Our research from 91 ads over 4 years suggests that if advertisers truly want to build on how people feel, think and relate to their brand, there is a lot more that could be done to increase their brand relevance.

Unsurprisingly, Super Bowl ads are highly distinctive on average — looking to make an impact by showing something big, loud and unexpected so people cannot help but pay attention. The intended goal being to grab headlines and therefore push the brand top of mind.

That isn’t always the end result, however. As we mentioned above, just because the ads make headlines and bring the noise, that doesn’t always benefit the brand as much as it could.

As shown in the chart above, Super Bowl ads are actually shown as performing worse than our global norm for brand relevance. In other words, many of these ads may be entertaining, but audiences don’t see them as being related to the brand. For such a large (and costly) opportunity to get eyes on your brand, that’s a massive miss.

But what if you could find that sweet spot? What if you could find the key elements that would allow your ad to entertain while also landing brand relevance?

Here’s an example of a Super Bowl ad that was unique and entertaining, but missed the mark when it came to brand relevance.

In the ad, the scene opens on a medieval battlefield with soldiers and peasants deep in battle, when a “Bud Light knight” enters. His entrance causes the fighting to cease as they wait to see what he will do. They discover he’s only there to pick up some Bud Light for his friend’s 30th birthday, but ends up blasting away their enemies as an afterthought.

While this ad may have jumped on the Game of Thrones hype at the time (2018) the characters were flat and there was not much to tie back to their product.

Here’s what some of the respondents had to say:

“It was stupid and pointless and doesn't really go with the product”

“Where to begin? The premise is a tired attempt to borrow from ‘game of thrones’. The ‘plot’ makes no sense…”

“It was not the usual funny ads that bud light does”

We also compared the brand relevance of this ad to another big player in the Super Bowl ad space (M&Ms) and saw that Bud Light received a relevance score of 4.5, which is significantly under the norm, while M&M’s Super Bowl ad scored significantly above the norm with a score of 7.3.

Here’s what respondents had to say about M&M’s ad:“I love that they are not as serious as other ads and present a light hearted play for us that gives an enjoyable persona to M&Ms and how I would be able to eat them happily with family and friends.”“I liked the unexpected humor…’would you like to eat me?!’ good stuff!”“I enjoyed when the red M&M turned into a human. It was hilarious, and satisfied my curiosity of what he would look like as a person.”

So what were the differences between these two ads? What elements did M&Ms include that pushed them much higher in their ranking than Bud Light?

So what features were so different in the M&Ms ad? First off, they used well-established brand characters (the animated M&M characters) which allowed the audience to know which brand it was right off the bat so they could focus on the entertaining storyline.

In addition to their trademark characters, M&Ms also included a trademark celebrity: Danny Devito. Known for his comedy roles, Danny Devito helped bring humor into the ad by transforming him into the red M&M and subjecting him to many unfortunate physical events (like when a bus sends him flying into a grocer’s stand).

With that transformation and the use of the “lucky penny” to grant his wish, the ad also included a touch of magic, an element we have seen to show success in other major advertising opportunities (think: Christmas time in the UK).

Cheetos

Another Super Bowl ad with similar traits that scored well was Cheetos’ “Can’t Touch This” commercial.

The entire creative idea is actually grounded in relevance to the brand — focusing on what a consumer experiences when enjoying their product with a touch of magic added in, giving them the “superpower” to get out of unwanted situations due to the cheese dust on their hands (also a trademark product truth!).

While many factors go into creating a winning ad, when it comes to landing your brand relevance on a major stage like Super Bowl, there are 3 main elements that appear to help:

1. Entertain the audience: When it comes to Super Bowl ads, it’s almost expected for the audience to be entertained. The whole event is about entertainment and the ads should be too.

2. Use brand assets cleverly: This could be through the use of recognizable brand characters, product truths, sounds and associations. Using them well will allow the audience to recall your brand and featured products easily while enhancing your storyline and creativity. If you don't have strong brand assets, start working on what those are for next year!

3. Include something distinctive or surprising: This could be humor, magic or something entirely unexpected (like a celebrity appearance). This will help your brand and ad to be noticed and remembered in the big lineup.

Last year's Super Bowl ads were very different from what we’ve seen in the past, with many large brands like Budweiser stepping aside or solely focusing on messages surrounding COVID-19.

Now that this year’s Super Bowl is fast approaching, what are we going to see from the ads this time around? What will the lineup look like? Will the ads jump on a cause? Will they look to entertain? Or will they focus on finding that balance between entertainment and brand relevance to make their ad stick? We can’t wait to see!