A small business can learn from this year’s Super Bowl ads to boost goals in 2021

Marketing firms spent millions; Here's our 2 cents

SHOWCASE RELIABILITY

Yes, alcoholic seltzer is hot. Yes, that leads to a joke writing itself about 2020 giving the world lemons and Bud Light getting the world drunk on them. But, aside from that, how did companies advertising during the Super Bowl reflect on cultural sentiment in delivering their messages? In many cases they used a cornerstone of advertising: Reliability.

Tracy Morgan – a hot ticket on the night, also co-starring in the above-mentioned Will Ferrell GM EV spot – made clear, with snakes and PB&J parachutes, that certain is better when securing a mortgage. And whether it was Gwen Stefani ending up on a date from hell with Blake Shelton, or Samuel L. Jackson giving a locker-room speech to an army of in-app game characters, T-Mobile and Version boosted the signals in their ads to ensure you that their 5G coverage will not let you down.

Carvana competitor Vroom spent millions to do the same, reminding you that safe at home when buying a car also means avoiding a trip to hell and back, haggling with the boys at the dealership. So how should local small businesses apply these methods into their own playbooks?

Again, the scope and budget of the absurdity of a Tracy Morgan might not be in your marketing budget. You may not be able to get a celebrity to mutually benefit from the shared exposure both of your brands would get in front of 100 million viewers. However, whether you offer an auto tow-and-repair service or you’re in mortgage lending, you can explain that your brand is reliable. Whether it’s a message of ‘We’re there when you need us,’ or ‘Don’t get left stranded without us,’ let your customers know of your importance and speak to their need of security directly.

GET NOTICED

I once had a dream, back when Mountain Dew had only one color and flavor, that I was staring at a gas station cooler, with the Dew being done in all shades of the rainbow. Fast forward a couple of decades and there has been Code Red, Live Wire Orange, Baja Blasts, and probably a blue and a purple or two, alongside a scope of multi-flavored Kick Starts – all with their own Super Bowl rollouts – all taking over the soda shelves. 

Now 2021 births to us Mountain Dew Major Melon, complete with the illest hot-pink-and-lime-green Geo Metro droptop in automotive history. Long ago, Pepsi-Frito Lay demanded that Budweiser hold their beers when it comes to insanity in a Super Bowl commercial. This year, we took a ride with John Cena and were implored to count the bottles falling out of the sky, the trunk, wherever, taking the commercial from TV and onto Twitter with a million-dollar contest. A Marketing 101 side note here: Use incentives to invite your customers to move across advertising platforms with you. 

The neon bling of the Mountain Dew spot is in line with other food spots from the night. You can’t help but look. The same was true with Hellmann’s tapping Amy Schumer as Fairy God-Mayo and Jimmy John’s mashing up Godfather and Scarface to sell you lunch. A sandwich is just a sandwich, of course, to turn a phrase from Madison Avenue, but just what is it about these ads that are worth $5 million-plus a slot?

For starters, they flat out bend the rules backwards. Take what’s palatable and make it a little bit cringeworthy. We all know soda makes us fell a little hype, that mayonnaise tastes better than kale and that Jimmy John’s is a balance of speed, cost and quality. Is it worth the big Super Bowl spend to create buzz, merely in order to cement this sort of brand awareness?

I will get to, in a moment, the cold, hard research that shows the balance of delivering the expected along with delivering a surprise twist, but in this context also take notice of what it takes to get noticed. Color, noise, a giant curveball. If you’re not using at least a little bit of this in your social media advertising efforts to break through the clutter, you might as well turn your Facebook business page over to your competitor. Why even post something that will never get noticed? Cut through the noise with noise, but only go a couple of decibels higher than the fray. And make it at least somewhat tasteful.

BE HUMAN

Coming off a year of emotional overload, perhaps the largest challenge of a brand is how to position itself into the chaos with at least a hint of sensibility while not overdoing it and coming off as pandering. Anheuser-Busch/InBev might have run away with the prize by morphing the phrase ‘Let’s grab a beer’ into ‘We need each other,’ (And after a year like that, boy do we), but other brands took this zeitgeist and ran with it to mostly positive results.

Bass Pro/Cabela’s/Tracker implored us to get back to nature, while Toyota rolled out the tearjerker “Upstream,” combining Olympic feat with open heart. 

Most controversially came Jeep, with a never known-as-a-centrist Bruce Springsteen introducing us to a church in Kansas while noting that the dirt beneath our American feet is common ground, rallying for us to once again find the middle of a Reunited States. Such sensibility seems dangerous in a time of polarization, yet the writing and the conclusion it draws are hard to argue with. However, coming from the same agency, it falls short of the fire forged by the Eminem-tracked “Imported from Detroit” spot Chrysler aired in the wake of the Great Recession and fails to invoke the most American moment for Jeep’s history, hauling GIs in WWII. 

Patriotism was also caroled by Weathertech, highlighting its workers in a pair of ads, “We Never Left” and “Family.” However, one does not have to be serious in a Super Bowl ad to capture the moment (and the attention) while also being part of the larger story.

Of all the heroes of 2020, among the most unsung were the food delivery drivers. A couple of companies who depend on those workers went for a lighter note, while also waxing nostalgia. DoorDash traveled back a half century to a generational standard, using Muppets from Sesame Street to show the power of the people in your neighborhood and how their app can connect you with them, while rival Uber Eats set its sights on Gen X, as did much of the night’s advertising, recruiting its own SNL alum for a We’re-Not-Worthy performance from Myers and Carvey, as Wayne and Garth, modifying a scene from their 1992 movie mocking corporate sell-out and subliminal advertising, leveraging their local-access show to promote local eats, with a hipness twist from Cardi B. 

The lesson to draw from all this to apply to your small business: Whether drama or comedy, evoke emotion. If we’re all in this together, why not tie your message into what your company is doing to keep it all from unraveling? Do you support a youth sports team? A local charity? Other good causes? How do you bring your customers into that mission? Convey it through your marketing.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD SUPER BOWL AD?

In a nutshell, how do you fit all of this into your own brand? Be unique but also be true to your own message. A study to soon be published in a journal of advertising science looked at a decade of Super Bowl ads and found that the most effective spots stood out from the other ads around them while also adding onto the aspects that already worked for that brand. 

Perhaps no better example can be found than Anheuser-Busch/In-Bev bringing back everyone from Bud Knight to the bottles from the Bud Bowl to help turn a beer truck upright and ensure that a few cold ones remained on the shelves. And after a year of empty shelves, one must wonder, among all the spots for household goods, why were brands like Charmin squeezed out of the Super Bowl shuffle? Maybe some parts of 2020 are best left in the past.

WE ARE 502ads

If you’re running a business in Louisville and you have yet to find out who we are, we recommend you get in touch. Are you doing all you can not to lose, or are you trying to win? Don’t let the play clock run out on you. 

Put us in the game and let us dial up your next play.