The Super Bowl is this weekend. It’s the biggest marketing day of the year, where every commercial comes with a sense of anticipation and excitement. Oh and a football game also happens to take place. It’s not that each commercial on the day is an event to itself, but they get leaked beforehand. Whole social media campaigns are constructed with the Super Bowl commercial the jewel in this crown.
Everything about the Super Bowl commercials is a cultural phenomenon where people are into it as much as the game.
Normally, when the commercials are on, people have a bathroom break or go to the kitchen to get something to eat. They couldn’t care less about the things no name actors are pitching. They maybe even skip through the commercials and not watch them at all.
When it comes to the Super Bowl, every commercial has a celebrity and/or a gimmick. Because of this, everyone stays to watch the commercials. Because of this, there’s an arms race to make the best, funniest, cleverest, most memorable commercial.
And this last part is the key.
Who can even remember any of the commercials a couple of days later? How many Super Bowl commercials can you remember from years gone by? Apple’s 1984? The Wassup One? Anything else?
A brand who’s betting big on their Super Bowl campaign is Bud Light.
It’s no secret that Bud Light had a year from hell. Ever since that infamous Dylan Mulvaney campaign, they’ve hurtled from one controversy to another.
So what can Bud Light expect of its Super Bowl Commercial? What sort of impact will it have on its reputation?
Moving back to people like Post Malone, Dana White and Peyton Manning demonstrates that Bud Light is embracing its masculine macho post. Something the Dylan Mulvaney campaign was a concerted effort to move away from.
And whatever their beer sales are for 2024, how much can be attributed to the Super Bowl Commercials? The only way to know it has a tangible impact is if there’s a significant spike in sales in the days and weeks following this Sunday.
Every other brand is in the same boat as Bud Light. The billion dollar question is being able to create a Super Bowl commercial that stands out from the crowd and can transform the fortunes of the brand overnight.
This is made even harder given that the commercial has to be made months and months in advance.
The key is to have the right celebrity doing the right shtick. The commercial has to tell a story in the short amount of time you have. It has to be sophisticated but yet simple to understand.
Most importantly, the viewer has to know and understand what brand is behind the commercial and what they do. This may sound obvious and basic but it’s surprising how many commercials fail to accomplish this.
If you don’t, it doesn’t matter what your commercial was, it’s going to be a colossal waste of money.