Super Bowl ads play for the heart and funny bone
The state of our union is deeply divided. The state of our Super Bowl ads is not.
Many of Sunday’s commercials will appeal to the better angels of our nature. Many more will appeal to our funny bones. None released to this point are overtly political — or, at this Me Too moment, overtly sexualized.
The approach of advertisers in these partisan times appears to be leave them laughing — or with lumps in their throats.
Budweiser will tell of its program to provide clean drinking water to communities hit by natural disasters. Hyundai will tell of its campaign to fund research on childhood cancers. Coke will champion diversity and inclusion. Kraft will celebrate families.
Brands are trying to connect “in an emotional context through an expression of shared values,” says Shawn McBride, executive vice president, sports, at Ketchum Sports and Entertainment, “rather than just addressing consumer needs, wants or desires.”
Social responsibility meets American consumerism on its high holy day of hype.
Still, there’ll be plenty of lowbrow
laughs amid the high-mindedness. Groupon’s ad includes a man getting hit in the groin with a kicked football and M&M’s includes Danny DeVito as a human M&M clobbered by a bus.
So far no advertiser has offered anything like last year’s ad for 84 Lumber. That began with a Mexican woman and her daughter readying to travel to the United States. The original commercial had a border wall but the ad agency said Fox asked that it be edited out.
“I think 84 Lumber was a bit of a sobering experience for a lot of advertisers,” Calkins says.
Super Bowl ads often reflect the times. And sometimes that means what is not in the ads as much as what’s in them. Don’t expect the sort of provocative fare that the domain-registration site GoDaddy traded in.
“Marketers have been utilizing women as sex objects to sell a wide range of products ... for years and nowhere has it been more noticeable” than in Super Bowls, McBride says. Now, though, “with revelations of sexual harassment and inequality in the workplace dominating the news on an almost daily basis,” he says, expect few, if any, such ads this year.
Rebecca Ortiz, assistant professor of advertising at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, says the trend away from sexualized advertising began several years ago.
“‘Sex sells,’ the phrase that we anecdotally rely on,” she says, “really isn’t true in the way that many in the public have thought.”
Patriotism is the last refuge of an advertiser, especially on Super Sunday.
WeatherTech, the automotive floor mat manufacturer, will air a Super Bowl ad that celebrates “Made in America.”
“So, well before Donald Trump was pushing ‘ Made in America,’ WeatherTech was pushing ‘Made in America,’ ” says company founder and CEO David MacNeil. “But I appreciate him following my lead.”
MacNeil says look elsewhere for funny commercials: “Our ad has no puppies, no ponies, no pretty girls, no dancers, no singers, no actors, no ex-governors, no bunnies, no lizards, no music and no spoken words.”
The day’s other ads will offer plenty of that. Humor, especially of the broad, slapstick sort, never goes out of style on Super Sunday. And Brent Snider, president, North America, at System1 Research, thinks we’ll see even more levity than usual this year.
“This makes sense, given the current climate in the U.S.,” he says. “Humor unites, politics divides. The Super Bowl is the most united day of the year in America, so it is smart for brands to focus on entertaining through driving happiness.”
This year, though, there will also be those commercials driving happiness by championing virtue.
“For brands who choose not to take the silly or irreverent approach in their creative,” McBride says, “we’re seeing an acknowledgement of the world we’re living in right now and in some cases an expression of hope or an opportunity to come together to address the challenges and the issues of this time.”
Clean water and conquering cancer, after all, are issues where there are no blue states or red states, only United States.