USA TODAY International Edition
Cooking up a Super Bowl ad? Just add celebrities
Stars aren’t cheap, though, and their spots aren’t always all that effective
During commercial breaks on Sunday, the Super Bowl may look a lot more like the Celebrity Bowl.
Make that the celebrity mixing bowl.
Just shake in a little David Beckham — in his underwear — and stir. ( That’s what H& M is doing.) Sprinkle in some Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima showing up in not one, but two Super Bowl spots. ( Kia and Teleflora.) Mix in a middle- aged Matthew Broderick, who reprises his COVER STORY famous Ferris Bueller character. ( Honda.) Add Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno, knocking heads for a collectible car. ( Acura.) And add a dash of rock icon Elton John, who stars with 19- year- old X Factor winner Melanie Amaro. ( Pepsi.)
Super Bowl advertisers are latching onto celebrities this year like starstruck teens. More than one- third of
the game’s 50- some spots will feature a familiar celeb or two — or three. At $ 3.5 million for each 30 seconds of airtime, advertisers seem hell- bent on attracting attention this year at any cost. Even, in several cases, if it means glomming onto a celeb with zippo to do with the brand.
Some are trying to latch onto the stars’ social- media following. Some are seeking instant credibility. And some think it’s the only way to stand out from the pack of Super Bowl marketers trying do just about anything to get noticed by the 100 million- plus TV viewers — plus untold millions of social- media fans to follow.
It ain’t cheap. Advertisers have spent $ 1.72 billion over the past 10 years just for Super Bowl airtime, estimates Kantra Media. Add to that the multimillion- dollar budgets for some of the more extravagant ads, and then they’ll also be paying celebs anywhere from $ 50,000 to $ 1.5 million to star in their game day spots.
“Every advertiser is looking for insurance,” says Noreen Jenney Laffey, founder of Celebrity Endorsement Network, which links celebs with marketers. “And every celebrity wants to be in a Super Bowl spot. Even for celebrities, it’s a big deal.”
There’s just one problem: Ads with celebrities are 3% less effective than ads without them, reports Acemetrix, a research firm that specializes in measuring ad effectiveness. And during the Super Bowl, they tend to do far worse. During last year’s Super Bowl, Acemetrix says, ads without celebrities performed 9.2% better than those with celebrities. And ads with animals performed 21% better than ads with celebrities.
“Dogs do better than celebrities,” says Peter Daboll, CEO at Acemetrix, which had online panels of 500 consumers review every Super Bowl spot from 2011.
“It’s hard to find a celebrity who isn’t polarizing,” explains Daboll. As a result, a chunk of viewers are immediately turned off. “You can’t find a celebrity who doesn’t offend anyone — unless it’s Betty White.”
White, of course, starred in a top- performing Snickers spot two years ago that also was a career boost for her. That’s why even celebs who decline other offers historically have been eager to do Super Bowl spots.
It’s why then- superstars Cindy Crawford and Michael J. Fox starred for Pepsi in the 1980s and 1990s. And before that, it’s why a young but wildly popular Joe Namath starred for Noxzema back in 1973.
“I had no idea at the time what the Super Bowl itself would become, let alone the ads,” says Namath. But as a red- hot, brash- talking celeb, he was thrilled to be paired with then- unknown model Farrah Fawcett. He says he wanted to ask her out but was in a relationship at the time. “Some ads may be a blur,” he says, “but that one I can still see clearly.”
All about the buzz
It isn’t just the glitz and the easy money that celebs like about Super Bowl ads. They crave the buzz.
“The Super Bowl is the one time of year when people watch commercials on purpose,” says Danica Patrick, the race car driver who will star in two racy Go Daddy ads on Sunday, bringing her total over the years to 10. She has starred in more Super Bowl spots than any other celebrity. All the broadcast, print and socialmedia hoopla before, during and after the game “is a big win for me,” she says.
Unless an ad really bombs, it’s a big win for any celebrity.
“It allows them to be part of one big entertainment extravaganza,” says David Schwab, vice president at Octagon, which links brands with celebs. Super Bowl spots also allow a celebrity to be extra cool via a kind of self- deprecation they don’t typically get to show otherwise, Schwab says. “The real pay is that it can stoke their image.”
That’s one reason why famed comedians Seinfeld and Leno show up together in a spot in which the two real- life car collectors lust after the same Acura sports car. And why Broderick shows up as a middle- aged version of his teen character from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, playing hooky from work this time for sister brand Honda.
For the carmakers, using celebs is all about attracting eyeballs. “We had a difficult year ( in 2011) due to the natural disaster in Asia,” says Michael Accavitti, vice president of marketing at American Honda. “We needed a spark to set this year off to a good start.”
A- list vs. B- list celebs
A dream come true
Budget constraints, even at this lofty level, have many Super Bowl advertisers turning to B- list celebs in 2012.
“The tipping point is the cost,” says Octagon’s Schwab. Advertisers, even in the Super Bowl, are under extreme pressure to limit costs. “Why spend for an A- lister if you can get about the same attention with a B?” he asks.
Dannon, for example, has former Full House star John Stamos pitching its Greek yogurt. Century 21 bundles Donald Trump, speed skater Apolo Ohno and former football great Deion Sanders — who also stars in a Bridgestone spot. Bridgestone, meanwhile, also is using former Super Bowl quarterback Troy Aikman and basketball stars Steven Nash and Tim Duncan. Then, there’s TV host Regis Philbin’s cameo in a Pepsi Max spot. And Arrested Development’s Will Arnett, now on Up All Night, hyping video service Hulu.
Some advertisers, such as Kia, are using multiple B- list celebrities in their ads, hoping that at least one of them catches the public’s social- media fancy. Try, for one moment, to imagine Lima, the sexy model; ultimate fighting champ Chuck Liddell; and 1980s heavy metal band Mötley Crüe in a single spot. Kia has not only imagined it, it’s done it.
“It’s all about getting people to talk about the spot and talk about the brand,” says Michael Sprague, vice president of marketing and communications at Kia.
It’s also about getting the celebs to tweet about the ads and yak about them on their Facebook pages. Lima, for example, has more than 1 million Facebook followers. Never mind that she’ll also be appearing in a Teleflora spot. “If she can help me tap into several million people before game day, I consider it a success,” Sprague says.
But Kia doesn’t have the Super Bowl ad budget to pay for A- list celebs, Sprague says. “We were looking at some of those, and their asking prices were outrageous,” he says.
Some are willing to pay. Last year, Best Buy snatched one of the ultimate Alisters, Justin Bieber, for it’s Super Bowl spot. “We went in with all guns blazing,” says Andreas “Drew” Panayiotou, senior vice president of U. S. marketing. And it earned the retail chain more than 25 millionwebviews within just a few days after the Super Bowl — and 1.3 billion consumer media impressions.
This year, it was preparing to do much the same. It had scripts in the works for ads that might have featured actor George Clooney or Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, Panayiotou says.
Then, Steve Jobs died and that changed Best Buy’s thinking.
“When Jobs passed away, it reinforced for us the fact that there’s a different kind of celebrity these days,” Panayiotou says. “We thought it was time to revisit the term ‘ celebrity’ and what it means. Folks in technology are today’s real celebrities, but people don’t knowwhomost of them are.”
So Best Buy, which views itself as a tech retailer, rounded up a dozen tech “unknowns” — entrepreneurs whose tech accomplishments might be familiar to viewers but whose names are not. It’s going to include snippets of a handful of them in its Super Bowl spot. Among them: the guy who developed one of the first camera phones.
Skechers also has made an unexpected U- turn with celebs.
Last year, its Super Bowl ad starred the very high- profile Kim Kardashian wearing very little in a racy workout with her personal trainer. This year its ad features a French bulldog, albeit with a cameo by billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.
Unlike Kardashian, however, Cuban says he’s a real bargain. “They’re not paying me anything,” he says. He’s only in the spot, he insists, because he’s a tech buff and he likes the technology in the new Skechers Gorun shoes.
Pepsi says its use of celebrities in Super Bowl ads continues to evolve because social media has put a twist on consumer relationships with stars. “If we put Lady Gaga in a Super Bowl spot just for the sake of having a big name, I don’t think we’d connect with consumers,” says Angelique Krembs, vice president of marketing for Pepsi. “We recognize that celebrities have a different relationship with consumers than they did 10 years ago.”
Pepsi’s big spot features Amaro singing a contemporary version of Aretha Franklin’s Respect for 17 seconds. The teenager says that just being in the Pepsi ad is a childhood dream come true. The winner of TV singing competition X Factor, with which Pepsi had a season- long, big- budget promotional tie, will sing for, as well as appear with, John in the ad.
Amaro says that when she was very young, she’d watch the Super Bowl with her dad— and dream.
He’d be watching the game, she says, while she’d be watching for Pepsi’s musicfilled spots. She recalls thinking every year, “I can do a commercial like this.”
This Sunday, she will.