America's Annual Ad Showcase: How Many Bright Spots Did This Year's Super Bowl Have?

"You have to be memorable, you have to be clever, and you have to say something that actually drives product sales — and do it in a way that isn't stupid."

On the morning of February 5, Beijing time, Super Bowl LII was played in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in minus 2 degrees Celsius.

The Super Bowl is far more than a football championship. QDaily covers it every year, even though the event is a long way from our daily lives, mainly because this "American Spring Festival Gala" is the most valuable single sporting event on earth. Counting media value, tickets, sponsorships and licensing, Forbes once put the Super Bowl's worth at 470 million US dollars — more than the Olympics and the World Cup combined. It is a carnival of live television, stage entertainment and commercials.

Even if you don't watch football, you have probably already seen, on Weibo this morning, the halftime show by Justin Timberlake, who sang 11 songs in 13 minutes. And if you are a Kris Wu fan, you will certainly have seen him perform at Super Bowl Live, the NFL's (National Football League) official pre-game event, a day before kickoff — an invitation that came because the league wants to open up the Chinese market.

41 to 33. The Philadelphia Eagles won the first title in franchise history, and their backup quarterback, Nick Foles, made his name overnight and was named Most Valuable Player. His salary for the whole season would buy only 30 seconds of Super Bowl airtime.

Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Budweiser, Amazon, Toyota, Tide, America's telecom carriers, Australian tourism, airlines — all sent their signals to more than 100 million viewers in that one window. Avengers: Infinity War, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and HBO's Westworld Season 2 all used the game to run trailers.

Two days before kickoff, NBC announced that every ad slot had sold out and expected to take in 500 million US dollars from this year's Super Bowl, at 5 million dollars per 30 seconds.

But some numbers and signs suggest the Super Bowl's pull is slipping. NBC said this year's audience would pass 100 million but would not break any record; viewership has fallen two years running since it peaked at 114 million in 2015. NFL regular-season ratings also dropped 10 percent this year.

The 5-million-dollar price was also a little below the 5.5 million Fox charged last year, and the slots sold more slowly than they did then.

Cases like Wix.com — which first decided to skip the Super Bowl, then announced at the last minute that it would buy in after all — say something about how hesitant advertisers have become in judging what a Super Bowl ad is worth.

Febreze, the Procter & Gamble air freshener, began calling in agencies to pitch as early as the start of last August. Guerin McClure, Febreze's deputy brand director, described making a Super Bowl ad to the Wall Street Journal as "a pressure cooker": "You have to be memorable, you have to be clever, and you have to say something that actually drives product sales — and do it in a way that isn't stupid."

Digital takes a bigger share of marketing budgets every year, and marketers still weight the Super Bowl this heavily because, as Wieden + Kennedy creative director Hal Curtis put it, "the Super Bowl is the last piece of mass media. Media today has fractured."

Most of what travels on the internet and social media travels only inside one bubble. CNN reporter Frank Pallotta wrote: "How many things can bring 100 million people together in this divided country right now? Still the Super Bowl."

But after several ads in last year's Super Bowl set off arguments on social media that grew into brand crises, marketers have begun to see that they need a better balance between an entertainment event made for a huge audience and the many-sided opinions that circulate on social platforms.

Dean Evans, chief marketing officer of Hyundai USA, said: "It's riskier [to make ads] now than it has ever been. Thank you, Mr. Trump."

That starting point made this year's Super Bowl ads longer, more nostalgic, fonder of public-service themes, and on the whole more cautious.

All of which runs against the grain. Brands have always treated Super Bowl advertising as a chance to be bold, funny, sometimes outrageous, and to make their name in one shot.

Ads selling corporate values stood out this year in particular. Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, said: "Super Bowl advertising always reflects, to some degree, the mood of the country."

There were still ideas that looked properly Super Bowl — Tide and Doritos, for instance. Here is roughly how this year's high-grade creative contest went.

Longer Ads, but Not More Expensive Ones

This year's Super Bowl ran 53 ads in all, against 104 last year — meaning the average ad was about twice as long.

"Advertisers see the Super Bowl as a super-platform for telling stories, and stories take time." Dan Lovinger, NBC's executive vice president of ad sales, had flagged the trend in an earlier interview. This year's game carried more ads longer than 30 seconds than any broadcast before it, even though the 6-second ad was the thing everyone talked about a year ago.

Longer ads travel better online afterwards. In fact this is where all brand advertising is heading. When we covered YouTube's 2017 year-end ad ranking last December, we found that the most-watched ads, added together, ran twice as long as the 2016 list.

But while the average grew, there were fewer ads over a minute than last year. That is easy to understand: when the value of Super Bowl advertising is in question, holding down costs is the natural choice.

Last year nine deep-pocketed brands bought 90 seconds or more. This year almost no ad ran that long; the only 90-second spot may have been Amazon's.

The Two Most-Watched Super Bowl Ads So Far

"The Imp" Peter Dinklage battles Morgan Freeman — who wins? YouTube commenters say: Pepsi wins.

This was the first time a company put two of its own brands in a single Super Bowl ad, and staging it as a rap battle was smart (Chinese viewers, fresh off half a year of hip-hop mania, must have found it especially odd and delightful).

According to Visible Measures, the ad "Doritos Blaze vs. Mtn Dew Ice" had already collected 28.9 million views before kickoff — more than last year's leader, the Budweiser Super Bowl ad that drew wide controversy for touching on immigration (over 28 million).

Doritos, a Super Bowl regular, sat out briefly in 2017. Coming back this year, it dropped its old format of offering a global 1-million-dollar prize for the best fan-submitted idea and hired Goodby Silverstein & Partners, an agency under Omnicom Group, to make the ad. It looks like a big success.

As PepsiCo's snack and drink brands, Doritos and Mountain Dew are often marketed as a pair, described in the company's own language as the "essential fuel pack for watching games and playing video games." Doritos' new spicy flavor binds the two even tighter, and the ad makes a point of it.

Of course, anyone can tell the two actors weren't really rapping. The verses came from Busta Rhymes (best known for Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check) and Missy Elliott (The Rain, Get Ur Freak On). Doritos also put a short behind-the-scenes clip on its YouTube channel, filming the two hip-hop veterans' faces as they watched the ad on a phone — clearly groundwork for a second round of buzz on social media.

Worth noting: the teaser trailer went out of fashion at this year's Super Bowl. Advertisers have realized that not every ad suits an early preview. Releasing a full version that feels familiar and largely repeats the teaser, in the flood of game-day content, only cuts the surprise and leaves viewers more let down.

Amazon could still get away with it. In a 30-second teaser released beforehand, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos made his screen debut, called on to fix the crisis of Alexa suddenly "losing her voice."

In the finished ad, the sharp-tongued Michelin chef Gordon Ramsay, rapper Cardi B, actress Rebel Wilson and the veteran star Anthony Hopkins all turn up as Alexa's stand-ins.

When the "Hell's Kitchen" chef roars out of the speaker — "You're 32 years old and you can't make a grilled cheese sandwich? Just read the name of the dish and you'd know how" — I laughed out loud.

Reaching for a Modern Feel Inside a Nostalgic Mood, but the Ideas Fell Flat

Coca-Cola's and Pepsi's Super Bowl ads this year matched oddly well: both were very flat (and mild).

Coca-Cola pushed diversity and inclusion. Brynn Bardacke, the company's North America vice president for content and creative, said: "For us, what matters most is delivering those values through a creative idea, not through topics that might be controversial."

Pitching its different varieties of Coke for different occasions has been the old giant's approach in recent years, and "a Coke for everyone" fits that strategy. It is just that the original ad poem came out a little bland. The copy was written by Rebecca Wadlinger of the W&K Portland team, who holds a doctorate in poetry from the University of Houston.

Coca-Cola plans to run the text version of the poem as an ad in USA Today and The New York Times.

Even 51-year-old supermodel Cindy Crawford and her son couldn't rescue Pepsi's ad this year; revisiting the glory of a former beauty only underlined how tied up the soda giant now is.

Pepsi did plenty of marketing groundwork around this trip back to 1992, including a partnership with Google that used AR to let viewers step inside the ad. That isn't much of a new gimmick either.

It was the last line — "a cola for every generation" — that made us feel the two cola ads this year really were in sync.

Jokes Borrowed From the Super Bowl Itself Were Still a Surprise

Tide's Super Bowl ad was the standout. On creative grounds alone, it may have been the best of the lot.

The series, made by Saatchi & Saatchi, sends up every familiar type of Super Bowl ad: the glossy car commercial, the comic beer spot, the insurance ad with a phone number across the screen, the cola ad, the razor ad, the fitness ad — plus the kind of ad with baffling special effects that always shows up during the game. David Harbour, who plays Chief Jim Hopper in Stranger Things, stars. The "fake ads" are cut together, and their only shared feature is that everyone's clothes are spotless (even the man fixing a car or working out), while David keeps telling the audience that this is, in fact, a Tide Ad.

Tide ran four ads in all: the first a minute long, the other three 15 seconds each, one in every quarter of the game, each with different content — an excellent brainwashing effect. By the end, every Super Bowl ad you watched looked like a Tide ad.

Building the idea out of running jokes from inside the Super Bowl neatly dodged the thankless work of heartfelt, values-driven creative and still hit viewers hard. According to the ad-tracking firm Amobee, Tide's tweets of the ads had more views before kickoff than some movie trailers did.

Tide has enjoyed this "live broadcast" gag since last year: it had host Terry Bradshaw discover a stain on his shirt during a break, and his scramble for a new one blew up on social media afterwards.

No Longer Answering Political and Social Questions Head-On — Selling Corporate Values Instead

"It's really an awkward year," said Marianne Malina, president of GSD&M. "A year ago people reacted so strongly [to ads about social issues], and now it has all changed."

Tim Calkins, marketing professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, thinks brands can no longer carry the risk of talking politics at the Super Bowl: "Given everything going on in America right now, [talking politics] isn't very appropriate in such an emotional game."

Budweiser is the clearest case. Last year its Super Bowl ad caused a storm for alluding to America's immigration debate. This year it spent, lavishly, nearly a full 60 seconds on shots of factory assembly lines and workers being moved around.

While stressing pure water and safe production, it did not forget to cut in a television clip reminding viewers that during a disaster-filled year Budweiser donated three million cans of water to poor communities in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and California. Over the past 30 years it has given away 79 million barrels of water for disaster relief.

Safe to a fault, indeed.

Hyundai was the other brand to use its Super Bowl ad to remind consumers of its good deeds. The video, which plays almost like an experiment, promoted the company's donations to a children's cancer research program.

Dean Evans, chief marketing officer of Hyundai USA, said in a statement that the ad "wasn't about responding to the social and political climate… we wanted to acknowledge the incredible work being done to fight childhood cancer." Eric Springer, chief creative officer at Innocean, added that the ad was meant to show "not just selling cars, but the 'hope' built into the Hyundai brand."

Marketing professor Charles R. Taylor thinks ads like Budweiser's and Hyundai's are the smart play: "Millennials like brands that connect themselves to social causes." By one of his studies, only 6.4 percent of Super Bowl ads over the past decade have touched on corporate social responsibility.

Others pushed back on Facebook: if Budweiser wants us to buy limited-edition beer so the money goes to Water.org, why not just donate the huge sum it spent on Super Bowl airtime?

We wonder what those of you who are millennials think.

Cover image: still from a Doritos ad.