When it came to this year’s Super Bowl, Madison Avenue appeared to have hard marching orders: “Insert celebrity here.”
Ben Affleck. Bradley Cooper, Will Ferrell and Anna Faris were among the dozens of A-listers who showed up to hawk Pepsi Zero Sugar, T-Mobile, General Motors and Avocados From Mexico, among other items, in Fox’s telecast of Super Bowl LVII. The allure of celebrity was so powerful this year that Mars Inc. benched its famous M&Ms spokes-candies in favor of a cartoonish ad led by Maya Rudolph. Famous faces even showed up for serious items such as Dexcom, a glucose monitoring system for diabetics that enlisted Nick Jonas.
“This year, we just wanted to be entertained. We want to forget things,” says Tim Curtis, a partner at WME who oversees celebrity endorsements,. After an era during which consumers have grappled with everything from a nation’s polarized politics to a global pandemic, he adds, people simply want “to get back to the business of being entertained by our favorite personalities.”
Not everyone stuck to the formula. The Farmer’s Dog, a first-time advertiser in the Big Game, won notice for a 60-second ad that tugged at the heartstrings and told the story of a dog and a young girl who grow up together through adolescence and into adulthood. Molson Coors, back in the Super Bowl after a three-decade-plus blockade by rival Anheuser-Busch InBev, crammed multiple beers into a single spot and didn’t have time to highlight big names. And the National Football League surprised with a clever ploy that made viewers think they were watching a live interview between Fox Sports’ Erin Andrews and flag football great Diana Flores
“Some of the Super Bowl advertisers’ approach has become a little bit predictable,” says Michelle St. Jacques, chief marketing officer of Molson Coors. “We wanted to make sure we broke that mold.”
Humor and celebrity cameos have long been a staple of Super Bowl ad work, but the best work of the event often makes jaws drop or gives viewers something bigger or more complex to discuss. The exemplar of the genre remains Apple’s famous “1984” ad in which a runner trying to escape pursuit in some dystopian society, hurls a sledgehammer at a bloviating orator talking via a big screen about the importance of maintaining unified thought and vision. The crowd is awakened by the scene, which gave people more to think about than just buying a home computer.
“I think I just wanted to see more,” says Kai Deveraux Lawson, senior vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion at Dentsu Creative. “A lot of commercials are really leaning on the celebrities’ to carry the comedy and not really speaking to what’s happening in the current zeitgeist.”
More to come…