Andy Taylor Tackles the Ads of Super Bowl 50

The last time I wrote for shots, I took a look at the advertising goodies served up by Father Christmas. This time, I’m reviewing the offerings from his American brother - Uncle Sam. For advertising during the Super Bowl is as much of a showcase for the American ad industry as Christmas is for the UK.

So, the Super Bowl as I understand it, is a game of American Football (nothing to do with football, vaguely resembling rugby and lasting as long as a cricket test match), where the good folk of the US of A fast forward through all of the action to get to the next blockbuster from Reese’s Pieces or Cheetos. At the same time, the CMOs of these brands sit on the edge of their swivel chairs, worrying whether their $26 billion-a-millisecond media spend captures the nation’s imagination.

Adobe Marketing Cloud Solutions makes this very point in a lovely online spot. It leads us to believe a high roller has taken a punt on the Super Bowl, only to discover that, instead of backing the Panthers or the Broncos, he has backed his cream cheese brand with a catastrophic commercial to the tune of $4 million.

Herein lies a pretty fundamental point. If your brand were investing so much money in the most expensive media slot in the Western world, you’d make sure the commercial itself was pretty darn special, wouldn’t you? It seems most would, and others, well, it must have just slipped their minds.

Moreover, for a few, this frivolous investment of their shareholders’ cash becomes all that more frivolous when they cast a Hollywood superstar in their ad – an ad which is more worried about celebrity than it is the idea. It’s just throwing good money after bad.

An ad like apartments.com’s starring the one and only, not so cheap, Jeff Goldblum, for example. An ad where Jeff encourages us to move on up, as he croons “Movin On Up” at a piano on a crane which is movin’ on up the outside of a block of apartments. It’s as subtle as a quarterback shouting “hup hup hup, I’m about to throw it to CJ Anderson”. The CMO should know better, and so should Jeff…

…Jeff, Jeff, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, no one can! Well, that’s not quite true.

Take another mega-money celeb, stick him in an ad with an idea and your shareholders will cheer you all the way to the end zone. Like the hilarious performance by rapper Drake in the T-Mobile spot Restricted Bling.

Here, Drake, appearing to star in an advertisement for a rival carrier happily builds ludicrous suggestions from the marketing team into a revised rendition of his Hotline Bling.  It’s both self-deprecating, charming and a flipping good use of money - as is the star of our next commercial…

Give me a puppy... Puppy! Give me a monkey... Monkey! Give me a baby... Baby! And what have you got? The star of the Mountain Dew commercial.

Every single bone in my body tells me I shouldn’t like this spot. It’s the most trodden idea in the history of ideas – a combination of odd things to demonstrate, guess what? Yes, a combination of not quite so odd things – dew, juice and caffeine. Yet this strange, cute, un-cute beast has become my Super Bowl guilty pleasure, possibly only made funnier with the addition of a fourth figure, Donald Trump.

So from the freakish bit of fun from Mountain Dew to a somewhat different approach… Amidst all of the noise and colour of the Super Bowl and its festival of advertising comes a softer, quieter, more thoughtful spot. One that I’m proud to say comes from the iris stable and our family in NYC. One that puts the consumer at its heart in a montage of portraits, and humbly admits that without them there would be no brand, no history and as such, no story. After all: “we don’t make Jeep. You do.”

This ad is as big in its humility as others are in their production values and use of celeb. Two very different approaches. One answer to the very same sum.

Mega-money media spot + bloody good idea = buck well spent.