Super Bowl LVII: What Actually Worked

Sunday night, roughly $7 million per thirty seconds, and an audience that still gathers in one place at one time, which is the rarest commodity in media. Super Bowl LVII was a genuinely great football game, which is always bad news for the ads, and this year's crop needed all the help it could get. Here is what we noticed from the couch, with the studio group chat running hot beside us.

Celebrity was the strategy, and that is a problem

The dominant creative strategy this year was: hire someone famous, hope. Wall-to-wall celebrities, many doing bits with no connective tissue to the brand paying for them. When everyone buys the same tactic, the tactic stops differentiating, and on Monday morning people remember the famous face and misattribute the brand. Some pairings earned their money because the celebrity meant something: Ben Affleck working the Dunkin' drive-thru worked precisely because his actual, much-photographed Dunkin' habit made the joke true. Truth is what separates a casting idea from a casting budget.

The ones we would have been proud to make

• The Farmer's Dog, "Forever." A dog, a girl, a lifetime, and not a single wink at the camera. In a broadcast full of irony, complete sincerity was the boldest move available, and it won the night's emotional share outright. Craft note: it was also simply beautifully made.
• Tubi's rabbit-hole spots. The fake channel-changing interruption made an entire nation yell at whoever was holding the remote. A media placement behaving like a prank is a genuine idea about attention, not just a gag, and it fit a brand whose whole pitch is falling into content.
• Rihanna's halftime. Not an ad, except it absolutely was. A performer conducting a product moment mid-show on live television is the kind of earned-media engineering the brands in the pods were paying seven figures to approximate.

What was missing told its own story

Last year's game was wall-to-wall crypto. This year, after the industry's very public 2022, that category had essentially vanished from the broadcast. Nothing we saw this year matched last year's volume of category swagger, and the whiplash is instructive: categories buy Super Bowl spots at the top of their cycle, almost never at the bottom. Worth remembering the next time an emerging category, and we can all guess which one is next, floods the game with confidence.

The lesson for clients without $7 million

Most of our clients will never buy this game, so why do we watch it professionally? Because the Super Bowl is the industry with the safety off: maximum budget, maximum stakes, and therefore maximum honesty about what brands believe works. This year's broadcast believed fame beats ideas. The scoreboard, in the form of what people were actually sharing Monday, disagreed. The spots that traveled had a discernible idea that only that brand could run.

The transferable checklist costs nothing:

• Sincerity is currently underpriced. The market is long on irony.
• Borrowed fame decays overnight. An owned idea appreciates.
• The media placement can be the creative. Tubi proved it again.

Big game, old lessons. The price of admission changes; the physics never do.