Original article was published on the ANA website.
Move over Budweiser’s cute young Clydesdale. The foal that starred in the beer brand’s Super Bowl ad “First Delivery” may have captured viewers’ hearts with his heroic, beer-carrying exploits at the Big Game, but it was not the only one-trick pony on the night.
Groundhog Day may have taken place the previous weekend, but watching the seemingly endless red carpet parade of celebrities telling not very funny jokes during Sunday’s broadcast you could be forgiven for thinking they maybe got the dates mixed up.
Of course, this is the Super Bowl. A place where watching the same celebs struggle to land a few tired one-liners has become as much a part of the Big Game experience as eating your entire bodyweight in potato chips. But this year’s ads felt like a particularly lean year.
Odd celebrity pairings; stars appearing in multiple campaigns for different brands; movie stars literally telling the same jokes they made over 30 years ago. The list is endless. Honestly, I think I have had colonoscopy procedures with more laughs than some of the ads shown during Super Bowl Sunday. Poor Chazmo wasn’t the only one who died during that broadcast.
Looking at some of the industry reactions, I wasn’t the only one. As one quipped: “It’s as if every creative brief said, ‘Find a famous face and force a joke’.” (h/t Metaforce’s Allen Adamson).
Using our AI-powered content testing platform to measure the effectiveness of all the ads broadcast during the game, we found that despite 49 of the 67 ads we tested having amusement as their primary emotion, it was purposeful campaigns that stood out.
Interestingly, when we looked for the Super Bowl LIX ads that generated the most intense positive emotional responses, ‘funny’ ads barely got a look in. Only three made it in the top 10 and none appeared in the top 5. Instead, purpose-driven spots that tackled more serious themes dominated.
At the top was the NFL’s fantastic ad “Somebody | It Takes All of Us, which is all about empowering the next generation of football players. Other top 10 hits include Pfizer “Knock Out”, which talks about its battle to make eight cancer breakthroughs by the end of the decade, and Dove’s “These Legs”, which talks about the importance of keeping young girls in sports.
So do brands need to get serious about the Super Bowl? Well, after forking out $8M for just 30 seconds of viewing time at the Big Game, the stakes are already very serious. But I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone needs to use their airtime to start talking about important and worthy causes. It’s a party, after all. And the idea of being lectured through 60-odd purpose-driven ads on the night is enough to make anyone switch off completely.
After all, a lot of people only tune in for the funny ads. The problem is, making people laugh is far from easy. Especially battle-wearied Super Bowl watchers like me. What some find funny, others find annoying. To really make people laugh, you have to take a few risks, something brands are hardly comfortable with as you risk alienating half of your audience.
The way to combat this – other than the rather obvious simple solution of making your spots funnier, of course – is to have big back-up emotions to rely on in case the jokes don’t quite land.
There were, of course, some notable exceptions. Mountain Dew’s “Kiss From a Lime”, starring pop singer Seal, made our top 10 after attracting the biggest laughs of the night.
But what makes it stand out from the crowd is the fact that it doesn’t just rely on making you laugh to be effective. “None of this makes sense.” That’s the quote the Mountain Dew ad ends on – and they’re not kidding. The sight of Becky G in a boat watching pop star Seal as a singing seal is certainly enough to grab your attention. And that’s shown in our data, with attention slightly below average at the start, but ending above the norm, as viewers try to comprehend exactly what they’ve just watched.
But as well as being funny (72% funnier than the average ad), the ad also attracted intense feelings of surprise and excitement. The shots of the bottles of lime-flavored Mountain Dew Baja Blast also attracted feelings of craving double the US average (+128%).
Budweiser’s “First Delivery”, which is 10th in our list, is another great example. Sure, it made you laugh, but the ad also made you feel a lot more besides, including intense feelings of joy, nostalgia and warmth well above the US norm.
Even Harrison Ford had a classic funny line at the end of his inspiring Jeep monologue: “This Jeep makes me happy, even if my last name is (mouthed) Ford.”
Both ads were funny – the “horse walking into a bar” joke and “good-looking seal” jokes generated some of the biggest spikes in intense amusement throughout the night – but they also had the emotional depth to rely on just in case they didn’t. They were also incredibly memorable, scoring well above the US average when it comes to brand recall. It’s the combination of script, visuals and brilliant storytelling that made Budweiser a winner, while using humor in a supporting role.
Getting celebs to tell jokes may not be enough to get you noticed, so maybe try being heart-warming, surprising or just plain weird as well. After all, like Bud’s little foal, no one wants to be left behind.