104 Super Bowl Ads, 49.9 Minutes Total: How Did the Brands Spend Their Money?

America's most expensive 30 seconds of television cost $5.5 million this year — a contest of top-tier creative work.

Three hundred Intel drones formed the American flag, and Lady Gaga leapt off a high platform… On the morning of February 6 Beijing time, Super Bowl LI was played in Houston.

The game that shaped American sports culture and remade the country's entertainment and advertising industries drew 111 million viewers this year — and you probably noticed more people around you talking about it. Tencent held the Chinese broadcast rights, and its live stream peaked at 2.108 million viewers.

The halftime show was still the biggest draw. Lady Gaga's 13-minute performance drew 85.3 million views on Tencent. At the same moment, across the Pacific, 41,000 tweets containing the word "Gaga" were going out every minute. On Facebook, 396,000 people were talking about her every minute.

Gaga beat last year's Coldplay–Bruno Mars–Beyoncé lineup by a wide margin, on Twitter buzz and on exposure for the products she endorses. The payoff will show up soon in her album sales and on the Billboard charts, and it also drew plenty of eyes to the global tour dates she announced a day later.

Consider these numbers: a player on the losing Super Bowl team takes home $46,000 and a player on the winning team earns $92,000 for the game, while the halftime performer is paid nothing.

What you have to understand is that playing the Super Bowl is not only a mark of status but a powerful way to win fans. Bruno Mars's album sales rose 164% after his 2014 halftime show, and after Coldplay performed last year, their YouTube subscriptions rose 234% and their U.S. album sales jumped 365%.

"We can't count on every Super Bowl being a nail-biter that ends 20-19. You have to be ready for a 55-17 game," former NFL executive Jim Steeg once said.

Luckily, the fight for the Super Bowl LI title was anything but boring. Down 9-28 after three quarters, the Patriots erased a 25-point deficit and won in the first overtime in Super Bowl history, beating the Falcons 34-28, and 39-year-old Tom Brady took his fifth title.

The overtime brought Fox another $20 million in ad revenue. During this year's game, 65 brands ran 104 ads totaling 49.9 minutes, earning Fox $500 million — and that excludes the six and a half hours before kickoff and the day after the game. "It's already Fox's biggest revenue day ever," said Bruce Lefkowitz of the network's ad sales unit.

Modern football's 60 minutes of play are cut into four segments, each followed by a two-minute break. The format is made for television ads. That is also why the Super Bowl is called "America's Spring Festival Gala": it sells the most expensive 30 seconds of television in the country, and this year the price reached $5.5 million per 30 seconds, $500,000 more than last year.

Unlike the warm tone of Britain's Christmas ad season, Super Bowl ads usually run on humor and entertainment. But this year fell in the shadow of the election, and plenty of heavily political ads appeared, setting off plenty of argument. Before kickoff, the internet had already blown up over the openly partisan spots from Budweiser, Audi and others.

Still, the Super Bowl has always been a contest of top-tier creative work: among the year's most-watched ads on YouTube, Super Bowl spots often take more than half the list.

Agency Daily watched all 104 ads for you. Which companies spent big on marketing? Who got the strongest response in the least time? And which ones weren't content just to run an ad? Here is this year's contest of top-tier creative work.

Start with the clear winners of the creative war

Weighing views, creative quality and word of mouth together, the most talked-about ads this year — beer and celebrity endorsements aside — were the two nobody saw coming: Skittles and Mr. Clean, Procter & Gamble's household cleaner.

Skittles, dragged last year into the Trump campaign's attacks on immigration through no fault of its own (Trump's eldest son compared refugees to "poisoned Skittles"), ran a deadpan joke: a teenage boy sneaks under his crush's window at night and throws Skittles at the glass to get her attention, only to find that her whole family likes to eat them.

YouTube views: 8.56 million Agency: Adam & Eve/DDB

The 30 seconds has one clear idea and simple lines, and catching candy in your mouth is an inherently absurd, meme-ready image that stuck with viewers. Released early, on January 24, the spot has already been clicked 8 million times on YouTube, enough for the top five among all Super Bowl ads.

The other surprise winner was this slightly filthy cleaning-product ad.

YouTube views: 9.76 million Agency: Leo Burnett Toronto

The cleaner's cartoon mascot, Mr. Clean, turns into a muscular man in a white bodysuit who helps the lady of the house with her chores, and the two play out an unorthodox romance.

"Didn't think a cleaning-product ad could make me laugh," "Mr. Clean got dirty for the first time" and "that new Fifty Shades of Grey trailer looks pretty good" spread across social media.

Pete VonDerLinn, executive creative director at the agency Partners + Napier, explained this kind of comedy-heavy Super Bowl ad simply: "People need a breather right now."

The brand didn't waste the moment either, firing off tweets through the game that poked fun at other advertisers.

Another winner was Wix.com, a name you may not know. It is one of the largest website-building platforms, aimed at small businesses and solo entrepreneurs who need a site. Wix ran a Super Bowl ad this year too, and it stood out from the pack of pre-game teasers and made the brand's name.

YouTube views: 4.66 million Agency: In-house

That is still good enough for the top 10. Note that besides timing, Wix's cast decided the outcome: Jason Statham and Wonder Woman's Gal Gadot brawling in a bar, standard action-movie material, used to sell something as placid as web design. The mismatch is what sticks.

Intel's ad, by contrast, did badly, with only a bit over 800,000 clicks — even though it went out early (January 12) and starred the man most closely tied to the game, quarterback Tom Brady. It is a warning to other companies: when the timing, the setting and the star are all in place, ordinary creative will still throw the chance away.

Speaking of stars, nobody stood out this year like Lady Gaga. She performed the Pepsi-sponsored halftime show, "voiced" the trailer for National Geographic's original series Genius (in which Einstein plays one of her hits on the violin), and appeared in Tiffany's first Super Bowl ad. On the day of the game, Tiffany & Co. announced the departure of CEO Frederic Cumenal, 22 months into the job, blaming disappointing financial results in its statement. If you want to know how Tiffany has been doing, read this article.

YouTube views: 590,000 Agency: In-house

We won't forget Pepsi, of course, a Super Bowl sponsor for 15 years running. Pepsi sponsored the halftime show everyone watches (and made sure it carried the "zero sugar" name, to advertise its health strategy), and its premium water brand Lifewtr, which is going after Coca-Cola's Smartwater, put out a warm, humane spot of its own. Beyond showing off its one-of-a-kind colorful bottles, it set out to send a positive message into a society full of bad feeling.

Clearly it wasn't the only company thinking that way.

No surprise: plenty of ads tried to knit American society back together. Also no surprise: they caused a lot of argument

In an earlier survey asking what comes to mind first when you think of Super Bowl ads, 65% of Americans answered "alcoholic drinks." It isn't hard to see why. Budweiser, a Super Bowl regular, has burned itself into viewers' memories through sheer exposure. Its light beer, Bud Light, still holds the record for the most-watched Super Bowl ad on YouTube with 2014's "Puppy Love," and this year's return of the brand mascot Spuds MacKenzie, as a ghost, won plenty of praise on nostalgia alone.

But the light beer was quickly overshadowed by the parent brand's own ad, and that situation was far more delicate. "Born the Hard Way," a short film about the life of founder Adolphus Busch, drew a response nobody expected: as of now the one-minute spot has the highest view count of any Super Bowl ad on YouTube, more than 20 million, with nearly 40,000 likes — and 15,000 dislikes.

"You don't look like you're from around here." "Go back home!" That is what Americans in the ad say to Budweiser's German-born founder.

YouTube views: 25.98 million Agency: Anomaly

"Too political!" the critics said. The trouble was timing: on January 27 Trump issued a travel ban aimed at seven Muslim countries and signaled that immigration policy would tighten further, and this ad, released three days later, happened to tell the story of Mr. Busch, a German immigrant who crossed an ocean to reach the American dream. Some Trump supporters even started a #BoycottBudweiser campaign on Twitter, arguing that "this marketing is stupid — illegal immigrants and Muslims don't drink beer anyway."

Budweiser says the idea came out of eight months of work by an internal team, and that the script it used was picked from 13 candidates only last October. In other words, the story was settled before the election results came in, and the goal was to "emphasize the founder's great ambition and his relentless pursuit of the American dream."

The YouTube user @Lorren Charles called it a misjudged commercial that "will offend loyal consumers in the American heartland. The ad doesn't emphasize that he came to America because it was the only place that let him achieve his dream. It doesn't take the 'great America' route — it takes the 'America, a racist, anti-immigrant country' route."

Budweiser, though, sees money well spent. The film cost $2 million to $3 million to make, and with the airtime, this ad of just over a minute came to about $15 million. "The ultimate goal is to lift our business performance, to make sure it helps our sales, image and influence in the short term, and to prepare for the long term," Budweiser's U.S. vice president Ricardo Masques told Adweek.

Budweiser was not the only company caught in a "political correctness" fight on the stage of America's Spring Festival Gala. The construction company 84 Lumber, a Super Bowl newcomer, landed in the eye of the storm with an ad about a Mexican immigrant. It follows a Mexican mother and her daughter crossing the border to look for work in the United States. Fox ordered the first cut re-edited as "too political," because it showed a wall keeping mother and daughter out of the country. After the re-edit, none of the "political" plot appeared in the version that aired during the game; instead the company put the full version on its YouTube channel under the title "The Complete Journey." In the later part of that story, a door opens in the wall and lets mother and daughter into the United States, and the tagline appears: "The will to succeed is welcome here." The uncut film is below.

YouTube views: 7.48 million Agency: Brunner

Rob Schapiro, chief creative officer at Brunner, the agency behind it, says the film was meant to carry a message of patriotism and to make the company's name known across America: "[The ad is saying] that in this land of opportunity, 84 Lumber is a company full of opportunity. The company's expansion plans mean a lot of recruitment marketing ahead, and along the way we also described the basic qualities we need: a strong will, determination and hard work."

In any other year this ad would have made a smaller wave. It didn't get caught in the crossfire so much as walk into the line of fire. The company's taste for diversity and its liberal politics come through clearly, but they were certain to unsettle viewers who came for entertainment and are bored by politics or hostile to it, as well as everyone on the other side. The company had prepared for the bad reviews. "There are always going to be different voices, and we respect those opinions, and we understand that not everything is going to please everyone," Schapiro said.

But 84 Lumber got what it wanted. Like it or not, being named the most controversial Super Bowl ad did make the company a household name.

It is easy to see that over the past six months American companies and consumers have been boycotting each other over politics. First consumers started the #GrabYourWallet campaign against Ivanka Trump's brand, or threw their New Balance shoes in the trash because the company leaned Trump. Then people protested Starbucks over new cups they suspected of "selling its own political views," and turned against any ad tied to the election. Now the internet is trading insults over two more ads, and the outcome hardly looks surprising. A country split by politics will never run short of new things to argue about, and for advertisers, ads meant for everyone have started picking sides — which is only a way of pleasing the group they care about more.

Against that background, the ad from the haircare brand It's A 10 Haircare was shrewd. It found a smart way to make a political joke: mock Trump's hair.

The ad is one strange hairdo (and head of hair) after another, and the first line is: "America, we're stuck with four years of bad hair, at least. Whether we can make hair great again is now up to you."

YouTube views: 640,000 Agency: Havas Edge and Hungry Man Productions

One signature of Super Bowl ads is the live gag — here's how brands pulled off their "emergency" creative

The live gag — or rather, the fake live gag — uses the breaks and timeouts to broadcast something happening off the field. It is a newer tactic of the past few years: planned "accidents" turned into marketing.

The brand having the most fun with it this year was Tide. During a break, broadcast host Terry Bradshaw noticed a stain on his shirt, and the news quickly started "trending." While Bradshaw went looking for a new shirt, the "stain guy" joke landed in everyone's phone notifications and spread like a virus from country to country.

YouTube views: 4.25 million Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi

A new internet meme was born just like that. Riding social-media hashtags and the pull of live television, Tide's ad built a feedback loop with viewers, and the Super Bowl platform blew the effect up without limit. As one comment put it, "anything a celebrity does on this stage turns into a meme."

Snickers went a step further and pulled off an Inception-style live gag inside a live gag. It had spent weeks building up the news that its ad would be broadcast live from the Super Bowl, and it hired Adam Driver, who became famous as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Then the 40-second broadcast appeared to fall apart: Driver missed his mark, the stunt team followed him into error, and the Western-town scene turned into a pileup on the spot.

YouTube views: 610,000 Agency: BBDO

Adam Driver's cringing on set looked like he was playing himself — completely real. That wasn't the end of it. The Snickers account immediately tweeted an apology: "Sorry, this wasn't part of the plan." The straight face fooled plenty of viewers who missed the joke. Only the later "press statement" explained everything: hunger was the root cause of the live disaster, more proof that when you're hungry anything can go wrong — a perfect fit for the brand line "You are not you when you are hungry."

Driver followed fast, filming a 15-second live apology and throwing in the famous Kylo Ren tantrum. Snickers brand director Allison Miazga-Bedrick said on the spot that this was not what the company wanted to see, and that it was now running a nationwide buy-one-get-one-free promotion so viewers could keep hunger from getting to them.

Febreze also used the gaps in the game. The bathroom air freshener called its spot "Halftime Bathroom Break" — probably the densest stretch of toilet traffic in the country. The only problem might be the terrifying smell left behind as the family takes its turns:

Every year brings brands making their Super Bowl debut — some out to make a name in one shot, others making a last stand

Brands arriving on the Super Bowl stage for the first time usually come with a sharp purpose: to raise their profile, to shout about a new product, or to treat the money as the one bet that might save them.

This year we saw all three.

84 Lumber, above, turned a hot-button subject into dinner-table talk — not all of the response was positive, but the effect was just as clear. Busch beer used the long Buschhhhhhhh of a bottle opening in a clean, pastoral forest to grab the attention of the animals (and the audience); a simple idea, but the sound effect stuck. And before it went sexy, the home brand Mr. Clean had never had this much presence. Bai, the up-and-coming low-calorie health drink bought by Dr Pepper Snapple late last year, was already popular on social media thanks to its celebrity investor Justin Timberlake, and this time it got viewers laughing again with a deadpan spot starring Timberlake himself and the film actor Christopher Walken (built on "Bye" sounding like "Bai").

YouTube views: 470,000 Agency: Deutsch New York

Companies that buy presence without pushing a particular product usually have deep pockets: Bai, for one, will spend as much as $100 million on marketing this year. But other companies' ads had a heavier job to do — sell, sell, sell.

Nintendo's results have never been very reassuring to fans or investors; its stock fell 5.75% on the day it launched the Switch this year, probably because there were too few games at launch. This time it has 2 million Switch units ready for the March release. North American president Reggie Fils-Aimé said at the time that the number was "huge" for the company, so selling more consoles has plainly become the central task. The old strategy of selling hardware through games came out again: in the 30-second ad, the flagship Zelda title The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was the only game on screen. As one of the most anticipated games of 2017, it will surely make Nintendo good money.

Besides Nintendo selling a console, four more trailers this year were selling games, split evenly between mobile and console/online titles. Next to the by-the-numbers trailer for the big-budget The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind, a crudely made mobile game managed to shoot its trailer like a blockbuster — Evony: The King's Return, which threw in Chinese elements out of nowhere. Yes, you read that right: the Chinese actress Fan Bingbing is in it.

YouTube views: 240,000 Agency: Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners

Compared with the steady old hands, the newcomers were a mixed bag — though most of the unhappiness came from causes outside marketing.

Two brands were making a last stand: Tiffany and the supplement chain GNC.

Tiffany hoped Gaga would catch the attention of a new generation of women. GNC was less lucky. It got a green light from Fox but was shut out by the NFL, on the grounds that some of its products contain substances the league bans, even though GNC says those products are less than 3% of its total.

GNC has since run the ad across other media and picked up more than 4 million views on YouTube, but that is nowhere near the effect of airing during the game — one more blow to a company already down. In its most recent earnings report, GNC's revenue and same-store sales both fell more than 8%, and late last year it closed every store in the country for a day because its online and offline prices had fallen out of step.

We all understand the logic: a Super Bowl ad cures nothing by itself, but losing the chance to run one really does hurt.

Cars are close to mandatory in Super Bowl ads, but there weren't many surprises this year

Nine carmakers squeezed onto the Super Bowl: Alfa Romeo, Kia, Lexus, Audi, Honda, Hyundai, Buick, Ford and Mercedes-Benz. All but Lexus ran ads longer than a minute.

The deep-pocketed carmakers mostly chose the safest route: celebrities, comedy, or both. Kia had Melissa McCarthy, of Spy, drive off to save the world. Ford showed people getting past the small irritations of daily life. Buick made its ad for sports fans, putting the Carolina Panthers alongside Miranda Kerr, probably the best fit for the occasion.

The Mercedes-Benz and Honda ads were the ones that made you sit up.

YouTube views: 2.25 million Agency: Merkley and Partners, Antoni of Berlin

In case you're wondering, this Mercedes ad, steeped in 1960s cool, is the work of the Coen brothers, which explains its odd sense of humor: no matter how many tattoos an old man has, he is not as cool as an old man with a Mercedes.

YouTube views: 6.48 million Agency: RPA

Honda used CGI to make yearbook portraits move — eight-time Emmy winner Tina Fey, Oscar-winning director Robert Redford, the rapper Missy Elliott, the actress Amy Adams and more. One user commented under the ad that seeing a young Stan Lee (the soul of Marvel) say "if you want to create a universe, just do it" nearly brought them to tears.

Finally, the two odd ones out among the nine carmakers deserve a mention: Hyundai and Audi, neither of which pushed a particular model. Both pointed their cameras at subjects nobody expected.

Hyundai had announced in advance that its Super Bowl ad would be shot during breaks in the game, capturing "the best moments off the field," and would air afterward. That mysterious assignment was revealed yesterday: the company had filmed American soldiers home from overseas being reunited with their families in the stands.

YouTube has no shortage of surprise-reunion videos, but the tears that ordinary people produce when their feelings are real never stop working. Released right after the game, this one has already been watched more than 12 million times. The sentimental play worked.

Audi, meanwhile, set out to promote equal pay for equal work and was torn apart online. As a little girl drives a go-kart, her father's voice runs underneath: "What do I tell my daughter? Do I tell her that her grandpa's worth more than her grandma? That her dad is worth more than her mom? Do I tell her that despite her education, her drive, her skills, her intelligence, she will automatically be valued as less than every man she ever meets? Or maybe I'll be able to tell her something different." Then the tagline appears: "Audi of America is committed to equal pay for equal work."

YouTube views: 10.31 million Agency: Venables Bell & Partners

Judging by the reaction on social media, it was more divisive than either of the immigration ads. So far it has 50,000 likes and 60,000 dislikes on YouTube, and has been called "100% Democrat propaganda garbage," "anti-male propaganda" and "a made-up feminist problem that doesn't exist." By Network Insight's count, most negative comments treated it as political propaganda, while the positive ones said Audi did well to take on the gender question. Google ad marketing director Tara Walpert Levy and Pepsi global president Brad Jakeman both backed the ad.

Plenty of commenters said "the America I live in isn't like that," but the gap between men's and women's pay does exist, and it was one of the debate topics in last year's election. By Department of Labor figures, in 2014 women with a bachelor's degree earned only 76% of what their male colleagues made.

A few more ads worth watching, all of them wildly imaginative

Avocados from Mexico

The moon landing was faked, there are only 49 Shades of Grey, and besides Area 51 there are Areas 52 through 54… then the secret society running all of it discovers a traitor in its ranks.

YouTube views: 2.19 million Agency: Omnicom Group's GSD&M

Bai

A very cold joke — Bye Bye Bye.

YouTube views: 1.66 million Agency: In-house

T-Mobile

NSFW warning. A woman calls T-Mobile customer service, and her motives are not entirely pure.

YouTube views: 2.56 million Agency: Publicis

Cover image: Visual China Group; halftime show video screenshot