Who won the Super Bowl ad game?
Mutant babies, singing sheep and the ‘Walken closet’… No, not the cast of a Barnum production but the stars of this year’s ad spectacular. By Kate Magee and Pelle Sjoenell
Congratulations, then, to t he Denver Broncos, who beat the Carolina Panthers two weekends ago in Super Bowl 50. But for most of us, it was the ad breaks where the real battle was fought.
Advertisers spent approximately $ 5 million for a 30-second slot but, with an estimated 120 million people watching the game in the United States, the Super Bowl really is one of the biggest stages on which to perform.
So which ads got people talking?
According to Unruly, Doritos ‘ ultrasound’ by Peter Carstairs was the most-shared ad of Super Bowl 2016. When a fatherto-be snacks on Doritos at an ultrasound scan, the unborn baby is so desperate to eat the crisps, it tries to exit the mother early. The spot has been shared 900,000 times.
This puts it well ahead of the second- placed ad, T-Mobile’s ‘restricted bling’ by Publicis Seattle, at 350,000 shares. The spot shows Drake’s performance of Hotline Bling being interrupted by film directors, who ask the rapper to add in various lines about the company’s service.
Despite a number of brands releasing their ads early online, this year has seen a significant drop in sharing activity from 2015. The top-ten ads have so far generated nearly three million shares combined – a 36 per cent decrease from the same time last year.
Perhaps the most bizarre was for Mountain Dew by BBDO. It featured a (depending on your point of view) comical/ grotesque pug/monkey/baby hybrid dancing around a living room, licking a group of friends who are watching the game. The #PuppyMonkeyBaby hashtag received more than 65,000 mentions before the match was over, according to Brandwatch.
Celebrities were out in force as usual with actors including Liam Neeson, Dame Helen Mirren, Jeff Goldblum, Seth Rogen, Amy Schumer and Alec Baldwin all making an appearance. Some turns were better than others.
The ad for LG was disappointing, despite being created by Ridley and Jake Scott and featuring Neeson. In contrast, there was an amusing 60-second spot for Kia by David&Goliath that riffed off the idea that a ‘walk-in closet’ was actually a wardrobe with Christopher Walken sitting in it. When a man living in a beige house enters his wardrobe to find his beige socks, he encounters Walken, who rather creepily tells him (with the aid of a sock puppet) to embrace a more colourful life and drive the new Kia car. As Droga5’s group creative director, Matt Ian, says: “The ridiculous premise of Kia’s ‘Walken closet’ was oddly brilliant. It’s just… sticky. I can see the client ‘Walken’ the halls with that one after the presentation, giddy. It’s too dumb-in-agood-way not to work on the Super Bowl.”
Avocados from Mexico, one of the surprise winners from last year, followed up with another quirky ad. It shows a group of aliens taking a tour of a ‘Museum of Earthly Wonders’ that f eatures t he ‘ Cube of Rubik’, the emojis alphabet and ‘the white-andgold dress that started the civil war’.
But for Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s new worldwide creative chief, Pelle Sjoenell, it was the NFL’s own spot that stole the show. ‘Super Bowl babies’, by Grey New York, features different generations of children who were conceived on Super Bowl night singing a rework of Seal’s ‘Kiss From A Rose’. A better choice than Coldplay, you might argue.
Despite brands releasing their ads early, this year has seen a significant drop in sharing activity from 2015