🎥 Secrets of Successful Super Bowl Ads

What makes a Super Bowl commercial a winner?

Half the fun of Super Bowl watch parties is power ranking the ads with family and friends, and getting into heated debates over the best and the worst of them.

The brands that participate in the brouhaha every year grow a cult-like following for their star characters:

• The Bud Knight

• The Old Spice Guy

• The Budweiser Clydesdales

Pepsi always has a mega-star make a cameo, the various car ads are almost always a disappointment, and in recent years the Amazon Alexa commercials have been the stand-outs.

As of 2023, it costs $7M for a 30-second ad slot. That’s not factoring in the cost of production either, which is approximately $250K per second.

So with millions of dollars being poured into these commercials, what makes a Super Bowl ad “successful?”

Breaking the 4th Wall

“Breaking the 4th wall” originated in theater productions and is now frequently used in TV and movies. It’s a technique in which a story becomes aware of itself by a character directly addressing the audience or camera. They “shatter the glass” so to speak, and snap you out of your passive observation of the storyline, breaking down the fictional facade and rooting things in reality.

When it first came into practice, breaking the 4th wall was a super meta technique that broke barriers of storytelling. Now, it is frequently utilized, and still an effective way to a) jerk the audience awake or b) integrate them into the story itself.

One of the most brilliant Super Bowl ads in the last 20 years is this Tide ad:

Some clever writing and editing made this commercial break the 4th wall of every ad you’d seen up to that point. By pointing out that “everything is actually a Tide ad,” it actually changed the way viewers perceived every commercial following it.

A family friend I was watching the game with exclaimed “wow, what a great Tide ad!” after almost every commercial for the rest of the night.

To be fair, he was several beers deep.

[Insert meme] make this meme the Dilly Dilly and not the parentheses

Commercials often speak directly to us - the audience, to try to persuade us to buy, but rarely do they challenge us to think differently. This differentiation in positioning and additional layer to the Tide ad made it stand out from the crowd.

It was clever, it was meta. It allowed viewers to feel like they were a part of the big game and see how the sausage is made.

Granted, not every commercial can successfully break the fourth wall, but the whole point of this technique is to engage the audience in a new way. It forces them to interact with the media differently.

Direct Action

The ultimate goal of any commercial is to boost a viewer’s interaction with the brand and/or product. The best way to track the engagement of your audience is to include a direct call to action within your media.

On social media, it is easy to track views, likes, shares, and link clicks on your posts.

In Super Bowl ads, brands have started to add QR codes to spur and track engagement.

Last year, Coinbase spent their precious ad dollars on simply a bouncing QR code (an homage to that good old DVD screensaver).

The payoff has to be good - damn good - to provoke a buzzed football fan to put down their nachos, whip out their phone, and navigate to a website that will ultimately collect their information and try to sell them stuff.

Coinbase offered fans a chance to win cryptocurrency.

Bud Light created the 57th Super Bowl Music Fest venue sweepstakes.

Pepsi capitalized on their long-running sponsorship of the Super Bowl Halftime show and offered fans exclusive behind-the-scenes clips and chances to win merchandise from the Halftime Show performer.

Rewards and prizes are a great way to inspire an audience to action, but take note of who the audience is.

On Super Bowl Sunday, everybody watching is a football fan - or football-fan-adjacent.

Keeping that in mind, here is my prediction for the biggest winner of the 2023 Super Bowl Ads:

The FanDuel Kick of Destiny

What do you get when you pair one of football’s most recognizable characters with a hilariously cheesy contest and heated sports-betting fans?

The FanDuel Kick of Destiny.

Rob Gronkowski will kick a football live during the Super Bowl to determine whether or not bettors win a share of $10 million.

FanDuel itself is heavily aligned with the audience that watches the Super Bowl. Anyone who bets on sports is most definitely going to tune into the big game. It is expected that the total amount wagered this year will be over $1B.

FanDuel has their exact target market all in one place at one time. Their efforts to engage them has resulted in a goofy, entertaining piece of media that will surely entice both current and new users to their platform.

I would’ve loved to be a fly on the wall when the FanDuel and Wieden + Kennedy teams were brainstorming this idea.

Too often, Super Bowl commercials are a massive swing and a miss. The chaotic Proctor & Gamble ad from 2020 is the perfect example of what not to do:

• Famous faces just for the sake of having them there

• Zero storytelling structure

• Lack of clear focus

FanDuel managed to incorporate a famous face that is aligned with the audience, create stakes with a well-told story, and create buzz for a LIVE culmination (and payoff) of the story.

FanDuel’s VP and Executive Creative Director, Steve Giraldi, said it best:

So what are you waiting for?

Break the 4th Wall. Inspire Your Audience. Take a risk.

Have an ELITE Week,

Hannah

Elite Video of the Week:

Hannah asked ChatGPT to generate a script for a Piper Creative Super Bowl ad.