Brand Strategy Lessons from Super Bowl Ads

Welcome to HBR on strategy, case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts hand selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business. The super bowl isn't just American football's championship game. It's also one of the world's biggest stages for brand messaging. In 2024, the average 32nd Super bowl ad cost $7 million, and that doesn' include the production costs. But how do brand managers know if they're getting a good return on that huge investment? Today we bring you a conversation about the evolution of corporate branding with Bentley University Assistant professor of Marketing Shelley Santana. Using lessons from classic super bowl ads like Budweiser's iconic Clydesdale horses, you'll learn how to choose the best measurable goal for an ad campaign and account for the risks that can accompany bold storytelling like controversy or online backlash. This episode originally aired on cold call in August 2019. Here it is.

This flat tire needs a man, says the narrator of the Goodyear Tire commercial that aired during the inaugural super bowl the between the Green Bay packers and the Kansas City Chiefs in 1967. The ad featured a damsel in distress with a blown tire on a dark and lonely stretch of road. It goes on to say, when there's no man around, good years should be it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that advertisers took a chauvinistic tone for spots appearing on a game that was expected to be watched mostly by men with brands like Ford, Chrysler, Muriel Cigars and Budweiser. It was an advertising bro fest, but also a reflection of the cultural norms of the time. After all, the 1960s was the dawn of the golden age of advertising, when agencies were evolving from product pitchers to storytellers. That first super bowl was broadcast on not one, but two major networks, capturing an audience of 56 million viewers. A 60 second spot cost $85,000. Advertisers were hooked from the start. Fast forward to 2019 and the super bowl is still one of the most watched events on major network television. But now women make up almost half of the hundred million viewers. Thankfully, the chauvinism has been dialed back, a clear indicator that brand storytelling has.

Evolved with the times.

And at a cost of over $5 million for a 30 second spot, the competition between the advertisers is every bit as intense as the play on the field. Today we'll hear from Professor Shelly Santana and about her case entitled Super Bowl Storytelling. I'm your host Brian Kenny and you're listening to Cold Call, recorded live at the 2019 at Vanta CMO Executive Summit.

So we are all sitting there in the classroom.

The professor walks in, and they look.

Up and you know it's coming.

Oh, the dreaded cold call.

Shelly Santana is an expert in consumer behavior, particularly in relation to spending and credit. Before embarking on her academic career, she was a marketing executive at American Express.

Shelly, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks for having me.

We're not alone, are we?

No, we're not. We have a very full room in.

Front of us, sitting in front of a lot of people. Folks, make some noise so people know that you're out there. All right? And I will let you know that you're listening in on the 100th episode of Cold Call. So we're excited to be here today to share this with you, and we're going to engage you in the conversation.

As we move along here.

But, Shelly, I'll start like I always do. Can you just tell me what prompted you to write this case?

Yeah. So I was teaching a course on branding this year, and we were going to do a module on brand storytelling. And I thought the super bowl is such a unique opportunity to explore and examine and observe the range of storytelling devices and the range of storytelling features that brands use in this one moment and in this one platform. So that was one reason. The second reason is that it's such a significant cultural, economic, social, commercial enterprise, the super bowl, that I wanted to take advantage of it being the day before one of our main classes. And so we can sort of carry the social significance from Sunday into our classroom on Monday and just talk about the ads as consumers, but also turning the tables and examining them as brand managers and examining what is the effectiveness of these ads, what was the story that the brand was trying to tell? And when you look at the ads across the entire programming and there's 85 to 90 ads that are aired during the super bowl, which people actually watch, you begin to see the themes coalesce around a few different ideas. And those ideas tend to reflect what's animating and motivating culture at any particular point in time. And that's kind of an aha moment for the students to see.

Are they a little tired the day after the Super Bowl?

Bowl?

The students, they're very tired the day after the super bowl, and they're very, you know, we'll talk about some of the statistics, but I'm very lucky that our students tend to come to class even when they are very tired. Many, many people, about 16 million people actually call in sick to work the day after the Super Bowl. And there are some HR executives that are lobbying to actually have the day after the super bowl just be a holiday.

Because, yes, I'm in favor of productivity. It's just because the New England retrospectives apparently are going to be in the super bowl every.

An entire generation of people have grown up with the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

It's a wonderful thing.

Yes.

So apparently TV advertising is still a big deal.

It is how many minutes of advertising in, like a one hour program?

So typically a one hour television program has about 13 minutes of advertising on it. The super bowl, in contrast, which is almost a four hour spectacle, has 46 minutes of advertising on it. So a typical one hour program has about 17 ads. The Super bowl has between 85 and 90 ads. And people actually watch the ads, which is what's even more exciting. For the other 364 days a year, consumers go out of their way to avoid commercials. The super bowl is the one day of the year where people go out of their way to watch the commercials. So that's kind of fun.

And how much? The case gets into some data about.

How much brands are spending on advertising. Generally speaking, what does that number look like?

So in general, brands tend to spend about $224 billion in advertising across all different platforms. And television is about 35% of that. So about 78 billion. The super bowl in and of itself is a $420 million expenditure on just that one day. And that's just for the ad time. That's not the ad production.

Right.

That's another additional millions of dollars.

Exactly what you produce.

So how has streaming affected the advertising industry? I think we've heard over and over.

Again advertising is going to die. The advertising that we know today is going away, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

It's not, but it is definitely changing. So streaming is one of the things that has fundamentally affected advertising and how brands speak to consumers. And by that I mean when we were living in a strictly analog world, we all had to, let's face it, endorse some commercials. And sure, we might go and get a snack or go to the bathroom or talk to a friend, but we were even passively absorbing some of the messages that were being broadcast over networks. Now with streaming, you can bypass ads altogether and you can sort of pay to not even be exposed to any of the ads. So brands have had to get much more clever on how they're going to reach consumers. And what you see a lot of times now is these almost like micro ads, these 5 and 10 second promotional spots just to get some awareness out there for these entirely digital consumers that are out there, like my sons, who have no use for anything larger than a cell phone in front of them.

Yeah. So why don't we dive into the super bowl itself?

There are some great statistics in the case about food consumption and things like that on Super Bowl Sunday. Can you describe some of that?

Yeah. So I was talking about the cultural significance of the super bowl and I will say that I am a hu. NFL fan. So it was also fun for me to just write a case about the Super Bowl. But the super bowl is the largest. We consume more food on the super bowl as Americans than any other day of the year other than Thanksgiving. So we consume literally millions of pounds of potato chips and avocados.

I only eat £1,000,000 of potato chips on Super Bowl Sunday.

Billions of chicken wings, millions, tens of millions of cases of beer are sold on Super Bowl Sunday. And not surprisingly then, the day after the super bowl, the sales of antacids are higher by about 20%. 16 million people call in sick to work. And you can see across these different categories the week leading up to Super Bowl. There's a Super bowl lift in categories like condiments, dips, processed cheese. Right. You see the super bowl effect sort of trickling through the entire economy. So it's not just a day about football, it's a day about consumption.

The great American tradition of the football.

Exactly.

Awesome. When do the ads start to become.

Kind of their own phenomenon? I mean, I teased the opening with the Goodyear ad, and there were lots of advertisers in that first super bowl.

But at some point we must have.

Turned a corner where the ads became part of the story.

Yeah. So a lot of people point to Apple's 1984 ad, which aired not surprisingly on the 1984 Super bowl when they announced the launch of the Macintosh personal computer.

Great ad. Yeah.

And that is still in like the advertising hall of fame. A lot of people will point to the best ad ever. It was directed by Ridley Scott, who is a well known film producer and director. And it was really the first time that this really compelling story was told in anticipation of a product launch. And that became sort of the benchmark going forward for Must See TV and what brand storytelling could look like on this phenomenal platform when you've got one out of every three Americans in the country engaged in watching.

Yeah. And they're paying close attention.

I mean, people are like getting back to the TV to see the ad and then leaving during the game sometimes.

Exactly, exactly.

So, so does that mean the stakes.

Are a lot higher for brands that are featuring an ad in the Super Bowl?

I would say the stakes are higher.

Because it costs so much money. Right. Like a $5 million 30 second spot is a lot of money. So there's a lot of scrutiny around what are you getting for that $5 million? And one of the things I did with my students this year was I actually ran a mini ad meter just for my class. So what brands are doing a lot of times now, which I think is really interesting, is it used to be that you kept your ads under lock and key until the Super Bowl. Like nobody wanted anyone to see their ad before it aired live on the game. Now, about half of the ads are released in advance. And so we did a mini ad meter, which is what the USA Today runs every year. And for about half of the ads that had been released, I asked half my students to. To evaluate just how much do you like this ad? So they got to watch it as consumers. The other half of my students, I asked them, how many more sales is this ad going to generate? And then we look at those results in the class in real time. And the list of ads are almost never the same. Right. Like, they don't match up. And that's a big aha moment for students to think about. Well, what is the purpose of this ad? So. So going back to your question of are the stakes higher? I think what the cost of the super bowl does is it really forces brand managers to think about what do I want to get out of this and how do I measure the success of it? Do I want brand awareness? Do I want to drive sales? Do I want to drive conversation on social media? Those are all worthy goals, but they're very different metrics. And you need to be very clear on what, what you're actually trying to accomplish.

What do you think about this strategy of kind of leaking them out? I mean, I could imagine that you want to build up suspense. So you want to have that aha moment when the ad comes on and nobody's seen it or has a sense for it. But I do remember in the last couple of years, it's like everybody was putting their ads out beforehand and it felt to me like it was sort of anticlimactic at the game.

Yeah, There are some ads that don't get released beforehand, and those tend to be the ones that are around halftime, like the big moments. Right. The last ad ad before halftime, the first ad, when halftime is over, and sort of the fourth quarter ads, those tend to be held just for the Super Bowl. So that's pretty interesting. But the clever thing, I think about releasing the ads in advance is you begin to engage consumers earlier, and then when you wrap that around a social media strategy, you can begin to drive conversation about your brand before, during, and after the airing of the Super Super Bowl. So that's another way that you can sort of extend and expand your ROI on the investment. It's not just about that 30 seconds that's on network programming. It's really about the conversation that you're driving in advance and after the super.

Bowl, which obviously continues to drive the cost up. So now we're not just talking about advertising. We're talking about the incremental expense of, oh, I got to build a social media campaign around this. I've got to engage my customers through word of mouth. What does that look like to a CMO as they're trying to figure out how to sort through those kinds of decisions?

Yeah. So it definitely can drive your costs up. But the amplification opportunity on social media is significant. Right. So if you just think about 100 million people watching the super bowl, which is what typically in the last few years, over 100 million people have watched it. If you can get another hundred million people posting on Facebook, that's really powerful, and that's very compelling. So the reach that social media platforms have in addition to the network television programming and the airing of the super bowl itself is a real winner. That's a great combination.

What about, we know there's trolls on the Internet. I don't know if you've heard about them, but they're the people who kind of lurk around and are looking for any opportunity to say something negative. I'll probably get a bunch of troll comments on this podcast once we post it, because I've just called them out a little bit.

But do brands risk backlash?

So people know they're spending millions to be just to have the time, and then they're spending millions more for the commercial. As a consumer, do I look at that and say, well, that's kind of a terrible way to spend my money. Why would I buy your product?

Yeah. So I think brands risk backlash all the time. It's not unique to the Super Bowl. And particularly once you enter the social space, you kind of relinquish a lot of power around what is said about your brand, for better or for worse. And I think today's CMOs and brand managers are very savvy about that. But. And it's not just brands. It's also this year, there was actually a lot of controversy around who would be performing on the super bowl halftime show.

Sure.

That's always a.

And so it drives conversation, though. Right. And so on some level, there is still something to be said for how much attention your brand gets.

Is that the any ink is good ink philosophy or.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that any ink is good ink, but you can extend your brand exposure the more you're part of the conversation. So a lot of people were saying one of the ads is terrible. Well, if that's the lead story on the Today show, when they're talking about, here's the greatest ad from yesterday's game and here's the worst ad, well, you just got a few million more viewers to see your ad. Right.

Who is the biggest, I guess is.

One way to describe it. Who's been the most consistent advertiser on the Super Bowl?

So Budweiser has advertised on, I believe, all the Super Bowls, 53 Super Bowls, and they had it's 132 ads I think they've run, and to a tune of $440 million. So they are by far the biggest super bowl advertiser. Right. And they've had some of the most iconic ads on the super bowl as well.

Yeah.

In fact, the case cites one in particular as the best. I don't know. I'm not sure who rates that. But the best ever, which ad was that?

So that was the puppy love.

Remember the puppy love ad?

So consumers really love that ad. And it's just a really sweet story. It's very enduring about this puppy who's on a farm. And the puppy manages to dig under the fence every day and run over to the barn where the majestic Clyde's the. And he hangs out in the barn with the Clydesdales all day. And he's eventually adopted by someone. And the car's driving away and the puppy's looking out the window at the Clydesdales out in the field. And they notice that the puppy is leaving. And they actually, all the Clydesdales run down. They block the road. And the next scene you see is the puppy running back with the Clydesdales.

I'm getting choked up here. This is really.

And the brand logo isn't even shown until the very last screen before the screen goes to black. And the hashtag is best buds from Budweiser. So, yeah, a lot of people still say that's the best ad ever.

So that gets to my next question, which is can you effectively tell a.

Story, a brand story, in 30 or 60 seconds?

Yeah, absolutely. So there are really four elements to a great story. You need to have a character, you need to have a plot, you've got to have some conflict or challenge that they overcome. And you have to have a moral of the story, like what's the message we're trying to convey? And that's actually surprisingly easy to do.

In 30 or 60 seconds.

And some people obviously are better at it than others, but, you know, with those four pillars, you can absolutely tell a great story in a short amount of time.

Yeah. And when you augment it with social media, you can probably delve deeper into that story.

Are there some examples you can think.

Of of brands that have done well with that social media side of it?

Yeah. So again, just going back to Budweiser, they aired a live stream of the Clydesdales horses in their barn having a Super bowl watch party. And it was literally just a live feed of the Clydesdales in a barn. But the level of engagement of people actually watching the Clydesdales and then when it was mentioned on air, it would spike up again. Right.

And that was just a camera that.

Were held on horses for a few minutes. So these brands do a great job. Another great story that I love is Skittles this year. And this year's super bowl didn't run an ad on the super bowl, but instead what they did was they did a Broadway show.

Because what they realized with their insight.

Was that why are we advertising on the super bowl when people don't buy candy, no one's running out and go for a Skittles run during the middle of the game. Right. People might go for a snack run or a beer run, but not a Skittles run. So they took their money and they invested it in this Broadway show that would air before the game starring Michael C. Hall. And the premise of it was, Michael C. Hall is this famous actor who has been approached to do a commercial for the super bowl. And he is agonizing over this decision because it's going to kill his career. And the signature song in this show is advertising ruins everything. And the tongue in cheek nature of it, and this was all on social media. And then coupled with the actual live performance was one of the most interesting and creative and strokes of genius around super bowl net non advertising that ever existed.

But there's been several brands that have done that.

Right.

They've gotten attention for not being on the super bowl in the past, that's a different strategy.

Yep. And so, you know, Pepsi famously did it one year where they took all of their money out of what they would advertise on the super bowl and poured it into a different promotional social campaign. This year, interestingly, Coca Cola didn't advertise on the super bowl, and the super bowl was held in Atlanta in their backyard, on their home turf. And that really created a lot of attention as well. It was interesting because it allowed, again, from an offline branding perspective, Pepsi, who.

Did do an ad on the super.

Bowl, but also it allowed them to sort of blanket the entire arena with Pepsi advertising and Pepsi logo, which you would never see in Atlanta any other time. So that was a very interesting move.

But does that signal something?

Is there kind of a trend moving in the opposite direction? You know, we're in this period of.

Time where we've got a millennial generation.

That'S come up that really cares a lot about the social responsibility of their employers, and they want their companies to be doing the right thing. They want to feel good about where they work. I mean, could we see other big brands like that start to move in this direction, which seems to be anti the NFL, which is this big Las Vegas type attraction?

Yeah, I don't necessarily see it as an either or. I see it as a both. And. And what you see a lot of is firms maybe taking their opportunity on super bowl instead of advertising, their typical product that they offer might be advertising some of the pro environmental or the pro social or the CSR efforts that they have as a company. So Verizon, for example, on this year's super bowl, their sports was all about first responders and how in times of crisis and in times of disasters, the fact that you can get a call through and get these first responders there so that they can help people in a moment of crisis. That's a very different type of ad than what you might typically see.

Yeah. So just delve a little bit more.

Into how creative has evolved over time. We heard the Goodyear ad. Obviously we can laugh at it now, but that was a real ad back in the day. How have you seen things sort of evolve, particularly in the last, I guess, 10 or 15 years?

Yeah, I think that brands are, for the most part, and I would say.

Particularly in the last maybe five to.

10 years, have taken a much more political stance, and it's really trying to strike the right balance. So going back to these millennials who care very much about what their brands do stand for. Taking a stand on particular issues happens to be very important to millennials as well. But millennials aren't the only consumers that are out there. Right. Like, brands serve an entire continuum. And so trying to strike the right balance of tone and a lot of the commercials and the ads has been really tough. So a few years ago, again, the super bowl reflects what society and culture is talking about at the time, or what anxious about or what's animating us. And so a few years ago, there were a lot of ads on the super bowl that had a political undertone to them, whether it was about immigration, whether it was about inclusiveness. And there were some consumers who loved that, and there were some consumers who absolutely hated that, and they thought, hey, listen, the super bowl is my time to just escape and watch some really good football and some great ads. And so this isn't the time where I want to engage in a political conversation as well. And so this year, a lot of those politics were dialed back in the ads. And again, some people loved it. Some people said that made the ads really boring.

You can't make everybody happy.

You can't make everybody happy. Yeah.

So I guess watching the super bowl.

With you must be fun, because you're probably watching these ads in a very different way than the rest of us.

Yes. So I'm sitting there analyzing it, and.

My poor sons, they said they have two teenage boys. And I'm like, so what do you.

Think the brand storytelling device was?

And that.

And that's a great way to clear.

The room of teenage boys.

Go get some Skittles.

Yes.

So I do want to engage our.

Audience in the conversation a little bit now.

So we've got a few minutes left.

Time for a few questions. Let me just see. Is anybody out there interested in asking Shelly a question about super bowl storytelling?

Yes. In the middle.

Hi, Todd. Thanks very much. Do you have any data to indicate that that brand storytelling actually converts into consensus consumer behavior or consumption? So there are these fantastic stories on the super bowl, but I think a lot of us look at that and say, hmm, I wonder if that actually does drive sales.

Yeah. So this is a great question, and.

It'S one of the things that I talk about with my students. So at the brand level. So one of the things I say.

Is, if you're going to be doing.

Any sort of promotion, super bowl advertising tends to be a flashpoint because it's so much money. Right. And so the first thing is, what. What do we really want to get out of this? Do we want to get brand awareness, brand engagement, we want people tweeting, we want people. Right. But then the question is, how does that translate into sales down the road? And the correlation between brand awareness and brand engagement and brand activity and sales, there is a correlation there, but the correlation isn't one, to be frank. And it's a long tail effect often. So a lot of times you have to just be patient. And what I ask my students is, let's think about the opposite, which is if we don't do this at all, would we have the exact same sales? And I think there's stronger evidence of when brands don't invest in advertising and messaging and storytelling on a consistent basis. You see almost an immediate decline in sales when they do invest. It tends to either remain standing stable or go up. But it may not do that in the immediate short term.

Right.

So it's a patient long term play. Unless in that ad there's a very.

Specific call to action.

And like if you call within the next 30 minutes, then you'll get X. And that doesn't typically tend to happen on Super Bowl.

Other questions?

Yes, up front here, you mentioned a.

Little bit people staying away from political ads. For instance, this past year, I'd be curious to hear more on the negative effects a bad super bowl ad can have on a brand. And then, you know, if that sort of affected people saying we're going to stay out this year, we just don't want to go there because the chance of going negative or having a negative reaction is too great.

Yeah.

So having a really big backlash on super bowl can have a negative effect on a brand. But, you know, it's a calculation that I think the best brands make and they make wisely. Right. And so a separate case that I have is on Nike and Colin Kaepernick and the decision to use Colin Kaepernick as the face of the 30th anniversary of the Just do it campaign. There was a lot of hand wringing over that. And it wasn't obvious that this was a good decision. But the calculation came down to, and you know, this is public information, you.

Can see this in the press.

There are going to be a segment of our consumers who will abandon us. And there will be a segment of.

Consumers, consumers who stay, who are more committed, who buy more and will bring.

More people into the fold because of this. And the calculation and the math, frankly is which one is bigger? And that's how you sort of, you know, assess the risk.

Another question down front here.

Thanks for your perspective. So Far. I'm just curious if you would be thinking about next year's super bowl, or as we like to say, sometimes the New England Invitational. Would you be willing to hazard a guess at what you think the storytelling tone will be? January of 2020, I think we just.

Lost all of our listeners in the New York area.

Yes. Me being a New York Giants fan, I have to say it's a little tough to take, but okay.

Yeah, so. So it's very hard to tell because culture shifts very quickly. But I think what you can see from this year's past ad or past.

Super bowl, when you look at the.

Ads in total, there were a couple.

Of very clear themes that bubbled up.

One was sort of this rise of the machine and fear of AI and technology and sort of like our lives.

Are being controlled by these smart devices.

And then there was another theme around women's empowerment.

Right.

Those were kind of two themes that really emerged very clearly. I think the women's empowerment theme will quite possibly resonate into the next super bowl as well. And then I think, frankly, a lot has to do with what happens in the political climate as to what kind of like the other platform is going to be or sort of that other major theme. Right now, I think climate change. If I had to hazard a guess, I think something around climate change. And what are brands doing to be more environmental, more broadly?

Not just climate change, but an emphasis.

On environmental awareness, climate change, things like that. I can see that being an animating.

Force, again, because that's just so important to millennial consumers.

We have time for one more question, folks.

Yes, you mentioned that there's a lot of polls that occur during the game and the day after regarding rating of the ads. And obviously, all advertisers aspire to have the best ad. But what happens when your ad flops? How big of an impact is that on your brand value, your brand reputation?

I think it depends on the size of the brand, quite frankly. Right.

So one of the things that I.

So there are two things I want.

To say about this.

The first is that I have my students rate the ads, and then I compare that to what the national sample is on USA Today, and it's not.

The same at all.

And so the first takeaway for them is you are not representative.

So this is very important for you to understand. You are not representative.

And then in terms of ads that flop, I think it depends on why they flop. And I'll give you an example. My students really loved the Bumble ad with Serena Williams. They thought that ad was fantastic. That ad did not do well on a national level in terms of resonating with consumers.

I haven't heard that it's actually hurt bumble at all.

It may be a case of maybe this particular audience was too broad for.

The message that we were trying to.

Convey at this point in time. But when you're Budweiser and you've run 132 ads, not all of those ads are great, but they've been able to.

Sort of sustain themselves.

So some of it has to do.

With the size of the brand. Another one where it's a very small brand. This is, I think on the 2014 Super bowl there was a 15 person.

Company, Goldie Blocks, who won a contest.

And they advertised on the super bowl and they haven't advertised on the super bowl since. But that was like a huge boost to them just getting awareness out there. So. So it goes both ways for sure.

That was former Harvard Business School Professor Shelly Santana in conversation with Brian Kenny on Cold Call. Fun fact, that episode was their first ever live episode. We'll be back next Wednesday with another hand picked conversation about business strategy from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. And when you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all@hbr.org this episode was produced by Ann Sani and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Special thanks to Maureen Hoag, Nicole Smith, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Kabaz, Anne Bartholomew and you our listener. See you next.