14min chapter

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Brand Strategy Lessons from Super Bowl Ads

HBR On Strategy

CHAPTER

Super Bowl Advertising: A Cultural Phenomenon

This chapter explores the evolution of brand storytelling through Super Bowl advertisements, emphasizing their role in entertainment and cultural commentary. It delves into the staggering financial investments made by brands, the strategic decision-making surrounding ad releases, and the significant impact on consumer engagement. Additionally, the chapter highlights the cultural significance of Super Bowl Sunday, examining consumption patterns and the unique anticipation surrounding these commercials.

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Speaker 2
Thankfully, the chauvinism has been dialed back, a clear indicator that brand storytelling has evolved with the times, and at a cost of over $5 million for a 30-second spot, the competition between the advertisers is every bit as intense as the play on the field. Today we'll hear from Professor Shelley Santana about her case entitled Super Bowl Storytelling. I'm your host, Brian Kenny, and you're listening to Cold Call, recorded live at the 2019 Avanta CMO Executive Summit. So we are all
Speaker 3
sitting there in the classroom. Professor walks in and they look up and you know it's coming.
Speaker 2
Oh the dreaded cold call. Shelly Santana is an expert in consumer behavior particularly in relation to spending and credit. Before embarking on her academic career she was a marketing executive at American Express. Shelly thanks for joining me today.
Speaker 1
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2
We're not alone are we?
Speaker 1
No we're not. We have a very full room in front of us. We're sitting
Speaker 2
in front of a lot of people. Folks, make some noise so people know that you're out there. All
Speaker 1
right.
Speaker 2
And I will let you know that you're listening in on the 100th episode of Cold Call. So we're excited to be here today to share this with you. And we're going to engage you in the conversation as we move along here. But Shelly, I'll start like I always do. Can you just tell me what prompted you to write this case?
Speaker 1
Yes, so I was teaching a course on branding this year, and we were going to do a module on brand storytelling. And I thought the Super Bowl is such a unique opportunity to explore and examine and observe the range of storytelling devices and the range of storytelling features that brands use in this one moment and in this one platform. So that was one reason. The second reason is that it's such a significant cultural, economic, social, commercial enterprise, the Super Bowl, that I wanted to take advantage of it being the day before one of our main classes. so we can sort of carry the social significance from Sunday into our classroom on Monday and just talk about the ads as consumers but also turning the tables and examining them as brand managers and like examining what is the effectiveness of these ads, what was the story that the brand was trying to tell. And when you look at the ads across the entire programming, and there's 85 to 90 ads that are aired during the Super Bowl, which people actually watch, you begin to see the themes coalesce around a few different ideas. And those ideas tend to reflect what's animating and motivating culture at any particular point in time. And that's kind of an aha moment for the students to see. Are
Speaker 2
they a little tired the day after the Super Bowl, the students? They're
Speaker 1
very tired the day after the Super Bowl, and they're very, you know, we'll talk about some of the statistics, but I'm very lucky that our students tend to come to class, even when they are very tired. Many, many people, about 16 million people actually call in sick to work the day after the Super Bowl and there are some HR executives that are lobbying to actually have the day after the Super Bowl just be a holiday because yes,
Speaker 2
I'm in favor of productivity it's just because the New England Patriots apparently are gonna be in the Super Bowl every year an
Speaker 1
Entire generation of people have grown up with the New England
Speaker 2
Patriots
Speaker 1
in the Super Bowl. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2
a wonderful thing. Yeah So apparently TV advertising is still a big deal. It is. How many minutes of advertising in like a one hour program?
Speaker 1
So typically a one hour television program has about 13 minutes of advertising on it. The Super Bowl in contrast, which is almost a four hour spectacle, has 46 minutes of advertising on it. So a typical one hour program has about 17 ads. The Super Bowl has between 85 and 90 ads and people actually watch the ads, which is what's even more exciting. For the other 364 days a year, consumers go out of their way to avoid commercials. The Super Bowl is the one day of the year where people go out of their way to watch the commercials. So that's kind of fun.
Speaker 2
And how much the case gets into some data about you know how much brands are spending on advertising generally speaking and what does that number look like?
Speaker 1
So in general brands tend to spend about 224 billion dollars in advertising across all different platforms and television is about 35% of that, so about $78 billion. The Super Bowl in and of itself is a $420 million expenditure on just that one day. And that's just for the ad time. That's not the ad production. millions of dollars. Exactly.
Speaker 2
So how has streaming affected the advertising industry? I think we've heard over and over again, advertising is going to die. The advertising that we know today is going away. But that doesn't
Speaker 1
seem to be the case. It's not, but it is definitely changing. So streaming is one of the things that is fundamentally affected advertising and how brands speak to consumers. And by that I mean when we were living in a strictly analog world, we all had to, let's face it, endorse some commercials. And sure, we might go and, you know, get a snack or go to the bathroom or talk to a friend. But we were even passively absorbing some of the messages that were being broadcast over networks. Now with streaming, you can bypass ads altogether and you can sort of pay to not even be exposed to any of the ads. So brands have had to get much more clever on how they're going to reach consumers and what you see a lot of times now is these almost like micro ads, these five and ten second promotional spots just to get some awareness out there for these entirely digital consumers that are out there, like my sons who have no use for anything larger than a cell phone in front of
Speaker 2
them. So why don't we dive into the Super Bowl itself? There are some great statistics in the case about food consumption and things like that on Super Bowl Sunday. Can you describe some of that? Yeah,
Speaker 1
so I was talking about the cultural significance of the Super Bowl and I will say that I am a huge NFL fan so it was also fun for me to just write a case about the Super Bowl, but the Super Bowl is the largest we consume more food on the Super Bowl as Americans than any other day of the year other than Thanksgiving. So we consume literally millions of pounds of potato chips and avocados.
Speaker 2
I only eat one million pounds a year on Super Bowl Sunday.
Speaker 1
Billions of chicken wings. Tens of millions of cases of beer are sold on Super Bowl Sunday and not surprisingly then the day after the Super Bowl, sales of antacids are higher by about 20%. 16 million people call in sick to work. And you can see across these different categories, the week leading up to Super Bowl, there's a Super Bowl lift in categories like condiments, dips, processed cheese, right? You see the Super Bowl effect sort of trickling through the entire economy. So it's not just a day about football, it's a day about consumption.
Speaker 2
Yeah. The great American tradition of consumption. Exactly. Awesome. When do the ads start to become kind of their own phenomenon? I mean, I teased the opening with the Goodyear ad. And there were lots of advertisers in that first Super Bowl. But at some point, we must have turned a corner where the ads became part of the story. Yeah so a lot of people point to Apple's
Speaker 1
1984 ad which aired not surprisingly on the 1984 Super Bowl when they announced the launch of the Macintosh personal
Speaker 2
computer. Great ad.
Speaker 1
And that is still in like the advertising Hall of Fame it's a lot of people will point to the best ad ever. It was directed by Ridley Scott, who was a well-known film producer and director. And it was really the first time that this really compelling story was told in anticipation of a product launch. And that became sort of the benchmark going forward for must-see TV and what brand storytelling could look like on this phenomenal platform when you've got one out of every three Americans in the country engaged and watching.
Speaker 2
Yeah, and they're paying close attention. I mean, people are like getting back to the TV to see the ad, and then leaving during the game sometimes. Exactly, So does that mean the stakes are a lot higher for brands that are featuring an ad in the Super Bowl? I would say
Speaker 1
the stakes are higher because it costs so much money, right? Like a $5 million 30 second spot is a lot of money. So there's a lot of scrutiny around, what are you getting for that $5 million? And one of the things I did with my students this year was I actually ran a mini ad meter just for my class. So what brands are doing a lot of times now, which I think is really interesting, is it used to be that you kept your ads under lock and key until the Super Bowl. Nobody wanted anyone to see their ad before it aired live on the game. Now about half of the ads are released in advance. We did a mini ad meter, which is what the USA Today runs every year. For about half of the ads that had been released, I asked half my students to evaluate just how much do you like this ad? They got to watch it as consumers. The other half of my students, I asked them, how many more sales is this ad going to generate? And then we look at those results in the class in real time. And the list of ads are almost never the same, right? Like they don't match up. And that's a big aha moment for students to think about, well, what is the purpose of this ad? So going back to your question of, you know, are the stakes higher? I think what the cost of the Super Bowl does is it really forces brand managers to think about, what do I want to get out of this? And how do I measure the success of it? Do I want brand awareness? Do I want to drive sales? Do I want to drive conversation on social media? Those are all worthy goals, but they're very different metrics and you need to be very clear on like what you're actually trying to accomplish.
Speaker 2
What do you think about this strategy of kind of leaking them out? I mean, I could imagine that you want to build up suspense. So you want to have that aha moment when the ad comes on and nobody's seen it or has a sense for it. But I do remember in the last couple of years, it's like everybody was putting their ads out beforehand, and it felt to me like it was sort of anticlimactic at the game.
Speaker 1
Yeah, there are some ads that don't get released beforehand, and those tend to be the ones that are around halftime, like the big moments, right? The last ad before halftime, the first ad when halftime is over, and sort of the fourth quarter ads, those tend to be held just for the Super Bowl. So that's pretty interesting. But the clever thing, I think, about releasing the ads in advance is you begin to engage consumers earlier, and then when you wrap that around a social media strategy, you can begin to drive conversation about your brand before, during, and after the airing of the Super Bowl. So that's another way that you can sort of extend and expand your ROI on the investment. It's not just about that 30 seconds, that's on network programming. It's really about the conversation that you're driving in advance and after the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2
Which obviously continues to drive the cost up. So now we're not just talking about advertising, we're talking about the incremental expense of, oh I gotta build a social media campaign around this, I've got to engage my customers through word of mouth. What does that look like to a CMO as they're trying to figure out how to sort through those kinds of decisions?
Speaker 1
Yeah, so it definitely can drive your costs up, but the amplification opportunity on social media is significant, right? So if you just think about 100 million people watching the Super Bowl, which is what typically, you know, the last few years, over a hundred million people have watched it. If you can get another hundred million people posting on Facebook, you know, that's really powerful and that's very compelling. So the reach that social media platforms have in addition to the network television programming and the airing of the Super Bowl itself is a real winner. That's a great combination. What about, we know
Speaker 2
there's trolls on the internet. I don't know if you've heard about them, but they're the people who kind of lurk around and are looking for any opportunity to say something negative. I'll probably get a bunch of troll comments on this podcast once we post it because I've just called them out a little bit. But do brands risk backlash? You know, so people know they're spending millions to be, just to have the time on, and then they're spending millions more for the commercial. You know, as a consumer, do I look at that and say, well, that's kind of a terrible way to spend my money. Why would I buy your product?
Speaker 1
Yeah, so I think brands risk backlash all the time. Like, it's not unique to the Super Bowl. And you know, particularly once you enter the social space, you kind of relinquish a lot of power around what is said about your brand. For better or for worse. And I think today's CMOs and brand managers are very savvy about that. But it's not just brands, it's also you know this year there was actually a lot of controversy around who would be performing on the Super Bowl halftime show.
Speaker 2
Sure, that's always a big deal.
Speaker 1
And so it drives conversation though, right? And so on some level there is still something to be said for how much attention your brand gets.
Speaker 2
Is that the Any Ink is good ink philosophy? I
Speaker 1
wouldn't go so far to say that any ink is good ink but you can extend you know your brand exposure the more your part of the conversation. So a lot of people were saying you know one of the ads is terrible. Well if that's the lead story on the today's show when they're talking about here's the greatest ad from yesterday's game and here's the worst thing. well you just got, you know, a few million more viewers to see your ad, right? So.

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