USING STAR POWER, ADS GO FOR LAUGHS
Actress McCarthy, Bradshaw assume comedic roles
Mark Twain didn’t care much for advertising — he said many a small thing has been made large by it — but he sure did like laughter. Twain called humor the great thing, the saving thing.
“The minute it crops up,” he said, “all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.”
That’s just what so many of the advertisers in Super Bowl LI were going for. Results of USA TODAY’s Ad Meter, decided by consumer vote, will run online Monday and in the newspaper on Tuesday, but by halftime funny ads that had scored high marks included Melissa McCarthy running from rhinos for Kia, Terry Bradshaw going meta for Tide and old yearbooks springing to life for Honda.
Humor is always a big deal in Super Bowl advertising. Regular advertising goes for laughs about 20% of the time while roughly half of Super Bowl ads do, according to Ace Metrix, a company that assesses the effectiveness of video ads.
Shawn McBride, executive vice president, sports, at Ketchum Sports and Entertainment, previewed 36 ads that were posted in advance of the Super Bowl and found two-thirds featured a humorous approach.
He says audiences are fatigued by deep divisions politically, and that could be why it appears more brands than usual used humor this time.
Some brands did go for serious messages. Budweiser got a lot of notice for its old-style immigrant’s tale and 84 Lumber for its modern take on that tale, though its website crashed when it asked viewers to see the rest of the story online.
Airbnb scored big buzz with an ad boldly celebrating diversity, which felt notable in a way that it would not have a year ago.
Amobee, a global marketing tech company that analyzes digital content engagement, said Airbnb’s ad and Coke’s pregame spot (with America the Beautiful amid many ethnicities) generated the most early real-time discussion on social media. And much of that discussion conveyed the polarizing divide in the country.
Many other ads were awash in laughter — or at least the pursuit of it — from the deep secrets spilled by Avocados from Mexico (there are only 49 shades of gray) to Humpty Dumpty taking a great fall for Turbo Tax to Adam Driver’s live third-quarter slapstick bit for Snickers.
“People like to laugh,” says Larry Chiagouris, professor of marketing at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “But the thing about humor is you either hit it out of the park or you die a slow death. There is not a lot of in-between. Humor is the hardest thing to do.”
Some of Sunday’s ads leavened humor with nostalgia. The ghost of Spuds McKenzie was back from the 1980s, taking a Bud Light drinker on a sort of out-of-body tour reminiscent of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. A dirtydancing Mr. Clean, whose TV roots extend to the 1950s, gyrated his animated hips as he whirled around the room.
And Peter Fonda was the punch line of Mercedes’ biker bar spoof of Easy Rider, the 1969 movie that traded its counterculture cred for a consumer-culture joy ride.
Many of Sunday’s ads mixed humor with celebrity. Justin Bieber promoted T-Mobile while Arnold Schwarzenegger ballyhooed Mobile Strike. John Malkovich played himself in a dead-on, deadpan gag for Squarespace.
And a Honda ad celebrated celebrity exponentially with talking photos of nine celebs, from Amy Adams to Robert Redford.
And at least one of Sunday’s ads employed the sort of potty humor beloved by toddlers and frat boys — Febreze and its olfactory ode to the need for air fresheners in bathrooms across America at halftime.