Annual American 'advertising festival' of Super Bowl, American football final game of the season, has turned into a game of PR more than brilliance of advertising craft, says Heli Ruotsalainen, dentsu Head of Creative.
Though Super Bowl ads are unbelievably expensive, +5 million euro per 30-seconds, when you count in the extra publicity and how many people will see the ad, the price is not so bad. Also multiple modelling studies have proved it is worth the investment.
Being annoying on purpose will get you earned media
To be a successful Super Bowl ad, it has to have brilliant creatives of course. But in recent years, we have more and more times seen that the most iconic ads also utilize other hooks, using celebrities, and focus on PR and getting as much earned media as possible for their commercial. All had either a trick, ads were produced in real-time, or were so over the top that people just had to talk about it: made to be annoying on purpose! All these actions of course even add to the eyeballs seeing the commercial.
The biggest talk of the game and after game was Swedish oat milk brand Oatly, known for its PR led marketing where they really take being on the edge and annoying to the new heights. Oatly produced a 30 second spot that was their CEO Toni Petersson singing badly in a field of oats.
See Oatly 2021 ad here.
Knowing people would hate the song and ad, they produced before hand T-shirts which stated the 'I Totally Hated that Oatly Commercial'.
Also T-Mobile's ad got a good spin in social media before the game. T-Mobile stated on the weekend that 'one of its ads was banned from Super Bowl'. Yes, one was banned, it took a stab at network quality by other providers. The game was sponsored by a rival brand of AT&T.
See T-Mobile 2021 ad here.
Reddit, the social media platform, was one of the earned media winners this year by only showing a 5-second text heavy ad in the game and it got people talking.
Read more of their stunt here.
One brand, that has been a Super Bowl staple for year is Budweiser beer by AB-InBev. They opted to release their Super Bowl flick a week before the game saying they will this year donate the money reserved for this ad to the covid-19 vaccination program in the the States. Clever move, which got huge earned media coverage the week before the game, and people really saw it as an action of emotional intelligence from a brand.
See Budweisers' ad here. Some of the charm of the action was pulled away, when AB-InBev did run a corporate ad for all their beer brands though, you can see it here.
It is also common that even though celebrities are used in the commercial, it just doesn't fly every time. Actor couple from the 70's Show, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, with reggae artist Shaggy starred in the Cheetos commercial that was just missing anything that would have gotten people emotionally attached to the advert. See Cheetos 2021 ad here.
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Watch a collection of all Super Bowl 2021 ads here. Fast Company rated 5 best and 5 worst ads here.
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Happy watching,
Heli Ruotsalainen
Head of Creative