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If you watch the teasers or already released ads for Super Bowl LXI, it’s obvious that brands are taking a light-hearted approach, playing it safe by leaning on humor and classic brand advertising iconography to avoid ruffling anyone’s feathers this year.
There’s a sense brands are returning to their place in culture, using advertising as entertainment rather than a place to take a stand of some kind that could potentially alienate their consumer base.
Case in point: There are loads of mascots and characters including Instacart’s mash-up of mascots with everyone from the Jolly Green Giant to Mountain Dew’s bizarre Puppy Baby Monkey making a comeback; Coors Light’s sloths; Squarespace’s donkey; and, of course, the Budweiser Clydesdales, to name just a few. There are also tons of celebrities like Jeremy Strong with Ben and Casey Affleck for Dunkin; Matthew McConaughy for Salesforce and Uber Eats; Adam Brody, Nick Offerman and James Harden for Pringles, among others, with reunions of beloved movies (Hellmann’s reunion of Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan for 60-seconds with When Harry Met Sally’s titular Harry and Sally; Vin Diesel and Michele Rodriguez of Fast and the Furious fame for first-time advertiser Häagen-Dazs).
The approach marketers seem to be taking for the big game, which will be a match up of the Philadelphia Eagles vs. the Kansas City Chiefs airing on Fox this Sunday, Feb. 9, is to return to a classic approach to the Super Bowl: brands as entertainers. It’s not surprising that marketers would take that approach. The more humorous, light-hearted approach has been more and more common in recent years. At the same time, marketers are coming off of a year of potential brand boycotts and backlash in an even more fraught political landscape.
“Taking a lighter approach and leveraging comedy and entertainment, it’s a safe way to engage with the country,” said Evan Giordano, strategist at Mother New York, who also noted that this year the industry seems to be leaning into its “place within culture” as well as the “spectacle and entertainment to avoid alienating people.”
That plan was likely the case for marketers regardless of the outcome of the election, explained agency execs, due to the culture war that brands have been dragged into whether or not they like it. It’s a different landscape and one that is pushing marketers to play it safe. Back in 2017, following President Trump’s first election, there was a sense that marketers were responding to that election — brands like Expedia, Airbnb, Coca-Cola and more all seemed to highlight diversity in some way that year; even Budweiser’s story of its immigrant founder was perceived as a response to the election. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time as brands sharply recoil from any cause marketing that could be even remotely seen as progressive.
“It’s not as morose as it was four or five years ago,” said John Doyle, chief strategy officer at Colle McVoy. “We saw a reaction that we’re not seeing this wave.”
It’s not just that brands are fearful of potentially upsetting some consumers or a backlash but simply a response to what consumers want from brands.
“Advertising went too deep into that place of sadvertising,” said Marcelo Pascoa, vp of marketing at Coors Light, when asked about marketers’ focus on humor this year. “Maybe we [the industry] were taking ourselves too seriously. … We’ve always had this lighthearted humor but now more than ever we feel like that’s what people want.”
The lighter fare this year may also be a recognition that people are craving entertainment as an escape from some of the harsher elements of the world today. That’s been the case for months and is likely even more true with tragedies like the Los Angeles fires and the D.C. plane crash fresh in people’s minds. Not to mention the uncertainties of the beginning of the second Trump White House.
“There probably is a little bit of an escapist thing,” said Tom Murphy, chief creative officer at VML. “It’s been a really heavy year no matter where you fall in terms of politics. There is a degree of the Super Bowl as this place that people can look to for fun and entertainment and I think brands realize that and are tuned into that.”
Whereas previous years may have had more “earnest, statement” approaches, there’s much less of that approach this year, noted Murphy.
“This lightheartedness will play really, really well with respect to where the cultural appetite is,” said Doyle.
Grammarly is in the midst of a transition, repositioning itself from a consumer tool to an enterprise tool. How does that show up in marketing?
So the biggest thing that we’ve been focusing on is brand awareness and top of funnel [marketing], and that was new for Grammarly. We had never really done that before. We went big on visibility [with] out-of-home billboards. We were in 60 U.S. airports, a lot of business publication ads, programmatic, connected TV, podcasts, March Madness, ESPN. That was somewhat risky in terms of thinking through: How do we choose to allocate a large part of the budget to something that is known as untrackable? Can you measure it? Does it matter? It really got a lot of attention.
So what came of Grammarly’s push into brand awareness channels?
What we initially found was that we were really trying to think about raising aided awareness for Grammarly as an AI solution for work. The bonus that we found out was that we were getting the attention of the C-level, high household income, high job titles. They were actually the cohort that had the best recall of our ads specifically for what we were doing, which makes sense given the attention that AI has and how leaders are trying to figure out how to position that within their own companies.
With the TikTok ban still looming (although with an extended deadline), what’s the contingency plan to maintain that influencer community/network?
There are other channels like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts that we can continue to rely on. Those are the obvious answers for everybody. We have a plan B for everything. The TikTok conversation reminds me of the third-party cookie conversation. We’ve been saying for years, it’s going to go and we have backup plans in place. — Kimeko McCoy
By the Numbers
The Super Bowl’s ad prices continue to trend up, with some :30 ads selling for a record $8 million for this year’s game. So far, brands like Instacart, Intuit Turbo Tax, Hellman’s mayonnaise are in the ad roster. Even with the increasingly steep costs, new stats from research marketplace company Cint hint the spend may very well be worth it. See key findings below:
- 61% of respondents said that it’s likely their perception of a brand would be changed as a result of a commercial during the big game.
- 34% consider potential big game-inspired purchases to be dependent on the product or service being advertised, and just over a quarter (26%) indicated that a big game commercial has no influence over their purchasing decisions.
- TV remains the primary means of advertising viewership for 64% of U.S. respondents, with YouTube (18%) and streaming services (5%) rounding out the three most likely avenues for commercial consumption. — Kimeko McCoy
Quote of the week
“The rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts is not only difficult to watch, but also lacks merit. DEI is not charity; it is a smart business decision.”
— Kate Wolff, founder and CEO of Lupine Creative, a women and queer owned creative agency, when asked about the complicated landscape for brands amid the DEI rollback.
What we’ve covered
- The definitive guide to what’s in and out (so far) in Trump’s second presidential term
- How creators are growing beyond the Super Bowl this year, from creator houses to fan festivals
- LinkedIn’s video push appears to be working in 2025
https://digiday.com/?p=567494
