Original article was published on the ANA website.
Celebrities trying to be funny in ads have become as much a part of the Super Bowl experience as shouting at the TV and eating your entire bodyweight in nachos.
With Super Bowl brands hopeful that a bit of Hollywood razzle dazzle will get them noticed in a crowded field, it’s a trend that hit new heights at last year’s Super Bowl.
Altogether, 68% of Super Bowl 2024 ads featured at least one celebrity, with more than half of those spots (58%) including more than one star (source). Just to put that in context, that’s a significant increase from 2023, when over 40% of spots included a celebrity, which was a sixfold increase from 2010 (source: iSpot).
With the Super Bowl set to take place at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on February 9th, we can expect another year of star-studded commercials. This trend of celebrity-driven ads is showing no signs of slowing down
But with Super Bowl advertisers once again ready to splash the cash to get celebs to front their funny ad campaigns next month, is it really worth it?
After forking out over $7M already just to get a 30-second ticket to the Big Game, is the additional cost of booking a musician, movie star or latest social media sensation to be the face of your campaign really a worthy investment?
Well, to find out, DAIVID gave its AI-powered testing platform all the nachos, pizza and dips it could handle and got it to analyse all the ads from the last five Super Bowls.
DAIVID’s algorithm is trained using tens of millions of human responses to ads to help advertisers know within minutes the emotional and business impact of a video or image without the need for audience panels – enabling advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns at scale. It meant rather than having to sit through hours of footage, the data was processed in less than 10 minutes.
As well as identifying the most effective Super Bowl ads of the last five years and the performance of funny celeb spots, we also wanted to look at the most common emotions from each year. Here’s what we found:
1.Stars fail to shine
While the use of celebrity cameos is becoming increasingly more popular among brands, advertisers’ enthusiasm for star power doesn’t appear to be shared by the general public.
Ranking all of the Super Bowl ads from the last 5 years using DAIVID’s Creative Effectiveness Score – a composite overall effectiveness metric scored out of 10 that combines the three main drivers of effectiveness: attention, emotions and memory – half of the top 10 do not feature any celebrities at all.
But that’s overall effectiveness. What about the positive emotions that a celebrity can bring and the halo effect that can offer to a brand? Well, again, looking at the top 10 most emotionally engaging Super Bowl ads of the last 5 years, only two feature celebrities. One is Jeep’s 2021 campaign “The Middle” featuring Bruce Springsteen, while the other – Disney’s “100 Years” – I’m not even sure should count as a celeb cameo as it’s just an edit of the most famous scenes from Disney film folklore.
To generate a strong emotional reaction from viewers, there needs to be a strong level of relatability, which celebrity-filled spots struggle to generate. Also, with so many brands now going down the funny celeb spot path, it’s also making it harder and harder to stand out. No surprise then that brands that do try something different – like Coinbase’s QR code ad, Oreo’s Dunk In the Dark” and Tubi’s 2023 “Interface Interruption” – are the most talked about campaigns in recent years.
2.Last five Super Bowls on average have generated positive emotions below the US norm
With so many celeb spots trying to be funny, it is any wonder that the averages from the last five Super Bowl are below the US norm?
Looking at the average percentage of people who had an intense positive emotion to each ad, the averages from the last five Super Bowls all fall just below the US average of 48.7%.
Sure, there have been a lot of standout campaigns in the last half a decade, but these have ultimately been drowned out by a lot of mediocre ads that fail to generate any significant positive engagement from viewers.
A lot of that is down to a lot of brands focusing too much on humour as their lead emotion. As any comedian would tell you, making people laugh is the hardest thing in the world, and if you fail to hit your mark, you need a back-up emotion just in case.
On the flipside, such lacklustre fare has not generated strong negative emotions either. Negative emotions for Super Bowl ads of the last 5 years have consistently stayed around the 26-27% mark, just below the US average of 27.4%. Essentially, the content being served up at the last five Super Bowls on average have not generated strong emotions either way – positive or negative.
This could also possibly explain why average attention levels for Super Bowl ads over the last 5 years have also been below the US norm. The content has simply not been engaging enough overall.
3.Super Bowl ads are becoming funnier
That’s not to say every brand failed to make us laugh. Last year, Paramount had a lot of people reaching for their sides with its “Paramount Mountain” campaign, starring Patrick Stewart and a slew of other celebs.
The ad made 39.8% of viewers laugh out loud, making it almost twice as funny as the average US ad and the funniest Super Bowl campaign of the last five years.
Certainly, the focus on humour has meant every Super Bowl we tested (2020-2024) averaged higher than the US norm, while our data also shows that Super Bowl ads have become progressively funnier over the last four years, with the 2024 Super Bowl the funniest in five years (average of 26.3%).
But, while some hit the spot, a lot failed. Two-thirds of last year’s Big Game ads had amusement as their lead emotion, but only seven ads made more than a quarter of their audience laugh out loud. That’s 10% of the 70-odd ads that run.
As I mentioned before, brands need to branch out into other emotions in case their jokes fail to land. Humour is notoriously hard to get right and incredibly polarising, so always best to have other emotions up your sleeves.
4.Pooch power beats star power
Rather than splashing out on pricey celebrity cameos, maybe brands should start looking elsewhere when considering who should be the stars of their Super Bowl ads.
One leading candidate is dogs, who when looking at the data from the last five Super Bowls, seem a much cheaper and more effective alternative.
Half of the top 10 most effective ads of the last 5 Super Bowls feature pooches in some shape or form. In some cases, such as WeatherTech’s 2020 ad “Scout” they are the main stars of the show.
Dogs, and animals in general, tap into a wide range of emotions that celebrities simply cannot reach. They don’t need elaborate storylines or complex narratives to shine in ads. Instead their natural charm and endearing quirks create a more authentic and memorable experience for viewers. And it shows.
Six of the top 10 most emotionally engaging Super Bowl ads of the last 5 years feature a dog. Of the remaining four ads, one features a cat. That’s significantly more than spots featuring celebs, which only appear twice in the same chart.
But you don’t have to just take our word for it. In the past three decades, nearly 30% of the ads that won USA Today’s Ad Meter have focused on dogs.
The Super Bowl sea of sameness
So does that mean Super Bowl brands should now ditch all their celebrity endorsements and instead focus on dogs? Of course not. Although, personally I am always a fan of bringing more dogs into the equation, regardless of the situation.
But what’s clear is that sticking to the tried-and-trusted formula of funny celeb ads is not working for every Super Bowl brand. Like humour, celebrities are incredibly polarising, and brands risk alienating large sections of their potential audience at the Big Game by investing heavily on star power.
Instead, brands should invest their budget on coming up with something that rows against the current in the Super Bowl sea of sameness and makes them stand out from the crowd. Try something different.
Now pass me the nachos.