Super Bowl Ads Entertained and Inspired
Positive campaign ads stay with viewers longer.
Feb 04, 2020
ALEXANDRIA, Va.—This year’s Super Bowl advertisers pushed both entertainment and inspiration, reflecting marketers’ calculation that game viewers mostly want to feel good or do good, reports the Wall Street Journal.
One ad featured comedian Bill Murray, who reprised his role from the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day” to promote the Fiat Chrysler Jeep brand. In other ads, country rapper Lil Nas X and actor Sam Elliott waged an Old West dance-off for PepsiCo’s Cool Ranch Doritos; Buzz Lightyear, Flash Gordon and other favorite sci-fi characters collected curbside pickup orders from Walmart; and Boston-affiliated celebrities Rachel Dratch, Chris Evans, John Krasinski and David Ortiz marveled at the “smaht pahk” automatic-parking feature on the new Sonata from Hyundai.
“We just want to entertain, and if someone got a takeaway about one of our vehicles, we’ll be happy,” said Angela Zepeda, chief marketing officer, Hyundai Motor America.
Traditional ad-supported TV is suffering steady erosion in ratings as alternatives, including ad-free streaming services, proliferate. But the Super Bowl still regularly draws an audience surpassing 100 million people, and Fox was able to charge as much as $5.6 million for 30 seconds in this year’s game pitting the San Francisco 49ers against the Kansas City Chiefs.
Ads attempted to uplift, encourage or touch viewers as “ads with happy messages stick with consumers longer,” said Joy Lu, assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “People tend to remember positive experiences or positive memories better, as sort of a self-preservation sort of thing.”
A few marketers changed their original advertising plans following the death of Kobe Bryant in a helicopter accident a week before the big game. Hyundai altered its second ad in the game to remove a helicopter that had ferried guests to a fancy party. Hard Rock International and Toyota also revised their ads.
Some Super Bowl ads acknowledged contemporary anxieties while still going for a laugh. In a Mars commercial, people try to solve the world’s modern problems by feeding a giant Snickers bar into a hole in the ground. When a couple live streaming themselves on the edge of the pit accidentally fall in, actor Luis Guzmán emerges from the crowd and shouts, “It’s working!”
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