This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "Super Bowl Ads: Marketing Genius or Overpriced Hype?" (published Feb 12, 2025) featuring a conversational episode between Eric Siu and Neil Patel. They discuss whether high-production Super Bowl–style ads are worth the cost versus lower-fidelity, more testable ads (including CTV/digital considerations), share examples (Coinbase, GoDaddy), emphasize experimentation, and promote their Agency Owners Association (marketingschool.io/agency). The excerpt includes casual banter about watching the Super Bowl with family and a closing call-to-action.
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What's your thoughts on ever producing like high-quality ads, like Super Bowl quality? Do you like them? Do you not like them?
I like them. I think they're funny. Here's the thing. I can't remember one Super Bowl ad aside from the Oreo one, which I don't really remember. All I remember is they lost power at halftime and I remember the Oreo one. So actually, no, I remember the Coinbase one.
Coinbase, Coinbase. Coinbase, GoDaddy. You remember, you know, back in the day, GoDaddy used to have commercials that really caused their business to boom.
I don't remember. I just know the Coinbase one caused them to crash and that, that 60-second one was creative because it's just a QR code and they just shot to number Yeah.
You don't even need to pay someone to do that one. That was really cheap. What I've always found is every once in a while you hear of like a company like GoDaddy who says, oh, we did a Super Bowl commercial and it was well worth it and it caused us to grow like crazy. But I would say 99 out of 100 times, almost all companies lose money on the Super Bowl on their commercial. They spend an arm and a leg on the creative. And on top of this, usually to buy Super Bowl airtime, you have to buy other airtime to get that slot. It's not like you just buy the Super Bowl ad. And the problem with really fancy creatives, like the ones that you create on Super Bowl, it's really hit or miss. So you spend all this money and you don't know if it's going to work. On the flip side, when you do like lo-fi quality ads that are more authentic, we've seen them convert better. And if it doesn't work, you just crank out tons more. You didn't waste a lot of money until you find the winning variation. Because dude, you and I, I would say, are better marketers than the average person by far. Would you agree with this?
Yeah.
I'm not saying we're the, The world's best or anything like that, but we're above average.
I'd say we're above average digital performance marketers.
Yes. All right. And when we look at ads, would you agree that you can't pick an ad concept from day one and be like, this one, I'm going to create this ad, it's going to convert for certain, it's going to be money ad and it's just going to print cash?
Not us.
No, you would assume that a lot of the stuff that you think would work may not work and some of the stuff that you think would fail sometimes work. Hence you and I really go hard with experimentation. You have to test a lot. Yeah, especially with online ads. And I think the same goes with television ads because even though we're digital, Eric and I run CTV, which is the digital version of ads, whether it's like Netflix or any of those channels, Roku, et cetera. And we've seen the same data. You got to test a lot. So if you want to go and spend an arm and a leg on a full-blown ad and you haven't tested first, you're just, it's a recipe for disaster.
We're still going to continue to see this just because people are used to seeing this. I think, you know, there needs to be a Doge for the entire advertising industry. That's what needs to happen. There's so much waste. Anyway, that's for another episode. But that's what we think about the Super Bowl quality ads. If you're an agency owner looking to break high 7 figures, 8 figures, or even 9 figures, the Agency Owners Association is for you. It's ran by my partner, Neil Patel, and myself. And we've been there, done that from an agency standpoint. And if you want to learn more about it, if you want to grow faster, get more clients, take yourself out of the day-to-day, just go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. Are you going to be watching it?
Yeah, I always watch the Super Bowl.
Oh, you do? While you have— are you going to be with friends or at home?
At home. I'll watch it with my kids.
Yeah.
They're excited because I told them we can go to the grocery store tomorrow and buy all the snacks for Super Bowl party.
Oh, nice.
So then they're going to pick food. We'll put out some of the Girl Scout cookies you got us. Thank you. Oh, nice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome.
And then—
Yeah. All right, guys. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster, and we'll see you tomorrow.
