In February, during Super Bowl LVIII, athleisure company Vuori released a 30-second commercial titled “A New Perspective on Performance Apparel.” It featured active, diverse young adults exercising, surfing, and playing volleyball against a backdrop of California mountains and coastline, with the company logo possibly superimposed on a sunset.
Over the past two years, the fast-growing brand has opened more stores and highlighted its eclectic collection of products in various commercials. But this TV commercial was different. As Vuori founder Joe Kudla told Modern Retail, the ad was “a visual reinforcement that we’re actually inspired by this active, aspirational California coastal lifestyle that we live every day.”
In other words, the primary purpose of a multimillion-dollar ad wasn’t necessarily to sell anything. It needed to build on its branding and drive traffic to its website.
It’s a modern strategy for multi-channel audiences. It wasn’t long ago that companies planned a portion of their marketing budgets around the 30-second Super Bowl commercial. However, as the digital landscape has continued to outpace linear media, more and more businesses have begun to lean on online channels – websites, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok – to connect and engage with their customers.
Collabstr explored some of the marketing decisions that go into Super Bowl ads, from earned media tactics to star power and teasers.
And with today’s Super Bowl ads receiving the kind of publicity reserved for movie premieres, complete with widely shared teasers and trailers, the 30-second spot is just one part of a brand’s larger, more extensive advertising campaign, which uses and brings back its great… game content before and after mid-February.
The big investment before the big game
Before brands spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads, it may take them months to determine how well a campaign will do. Using surveys, tests and briefings, brands learn whether different types of ads will be attractive to viewers. They then share the results with investors to explain their willingness to spend a lot on a creative idea.
Once they have some general baseline numbers, marketers monitor a wide range of key performance indicators such as brand awareness and perception, social impressions earned and owned, and tangible sales. This way, they can compare the difference before and after the match.
“You outline [the core brand metrics] at the beginning, and then set benchmarks against that,” José Aniceto, SVP and head of behavioral sciences at MullenLowe US, told Marketing Brew. “And if you’re a brand that can even afford to be in the Super Bowl, probably have a structure to compete against.”
“Afford” is a relative term when talking about large ad spend. In consecutive years, the average cost of a 30-second Super Bowl spot has been $7 million, a far cry from the first Super Bowl in 1967, when the ad cost $37,500 (or nearly $350,000 when adjusted for inflation). . Expect more of the same in 2025: Fox is already seeking at least that amount when the network hosts the Super Bowl again.
But brands need to be agile to compete for more than 120 million eyeballs. CBS virtually sold out its advertising inventory three months before the last Super Bowl, highlighting the critical role of live sports in media.
To get the most bang for your buck, brands leverage what works
The most effective Super Bowl ads put a new twist on tried-and-true strategies. Star power, for example, never gets old. High-profile hires add credibility and amplify an ad’s reach, but they aren’t effective unless there’s an organic connection between the celebrity and the product they’re selling.
Consider the 2024 Dunkin Donuts ad featuring Ben Affleck, the Boston-raised actor often spotted with the brand’s coffee around town, sometimes with a full arm. Capitalizing on Affleck’s everyman image, the coffee chain tapped him as its drive-thru cashier, and it paid off. The commercial generated thousands of online articles after the game and had a potential reach of 1.2 billion viewers, according to DECisionOne studies.
The commercial also exploited the inherent humor of the situation, another element of advertising success. Like comedian Will Ferrell driving through scenes from “Bridgerton” and “Stranger Things” in electric vehicles for a General Motors commercial, brands often use unexpected juxtapositions to elicit laughter and attention from viewers.
Even when ads create buzz, measuring their impact on sales and brand recognition is different. In 2014, Bank of America paid for a Super Bowl ad soliciting contributions for RED, a nonprofit co-founded by U2 frontman Bono. After every download of a U2 single, the bank donated one dollar to the non-profit organization fighting to end AIDS, raising a total of $3 million and improving the bank’s image. The dollar amount was a concrete metric, but a brand refresh is harder to measure.
Impact was measured differently for Jimmy John’s in 2021, when the sandwich company made a spoof “Goodfellas” ad and used online customer surveys before and after it aired to determine its reach. While Jimmy John’s Chief Marketing Officer Darin Dugan said he couldn’t directly link ad buying with the company’s increased awareness and sandwich sales, “it put us on the map,” he told Marketing Brew .
Ultimately, various metrics measure the success of Super Bowl ads. Long before YouTube, Super Bowl ads had the power to attract. However, the digital landscape has allowed brands (and studios) to pre-empt adverts and trailers before kick-off, turn commercials into QR codes and website launchpads, and use the central part of the game as a point of contact in an “omnichannel campaign” aimed at audiences around the world. their digital outlets.
Even if they’re not sitting on the couch in front of the TV, people are still watching, in one way or another: Americans spend 4.5 to 5 hours a day watching live, time-shifted, and streaming TV, and same amount of time on other types of media, according to Nielsen’s 2024-2025 Upfronts/NewFronts report. And that’s good news for advertisers and, in part, why demand for a Super Bowl commercial has only grown.
In August 2024, Variety reported that despite being six months away from the big game, Fox had already “sold out all but a handful of commercial inventory slots.” It’s another testament to the power of the game. While the nature, timing and success of the Super Bowl commercial continues to change, 30 seconds with your brand and product in front of the world remains an offer too good to pass up, no matter how you use it.
Story editing by Alizah Salario. Additional editing by Kelly Glass. Copy review by Paris Close.
This story originally appeared on Collabstr and was produced and distributed in collaboration with Stacker Studio.
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