Super Bowl LX: Culture from the nineties but not the creativity

On Valentine’s Day, two things for which all marketers and communicators should express their love are the power of a big platform and the magic of a beautiful story.

The Super Bowl last Sunday was viewed by just under 125 million people. The platform is as powerful as it has ever been. People don’t just watch the athletes; they watch the ads. A lot of work must go into making the commercials match the magic of the event. Indeed, Disney, who are screening the game next year (ABC/ESPN), just announced a yearlong celebration leading up to the event. I hope they bring some of their kingdom of magic to influence the advertisers.

What did we get this year? Three themes emerged in media and social conversations.

1. AI is everywhere all the time and that might not be a good thing. It was advertised (e.g. OpenAI, Claude, AI.com, Genspark, and CoPilot). It was leveraged (e.g. ‘youthifying’ celebrities in Dunkin Donuts, Xfinity). And it was referenced (e.g. Alexa, Svedka). Online chatter said it was too much and people craved reality.
2. The '80s & '90s are here again: Queen, Bon Jovi, Phil Collins. Backstreet Boys, House of Pain. And we also had the celebrities in their younger form. Affleck, LeBlanc, Brady, Anniston, Neill, Dern and even a real-age Broderick.
3. Creativity was sorely lacking. A millennial colleague said “I missed the quality of the ads I remember from the times I was a kid” referring to the nineties. Overall, the storytelling, the emotional engagement, the resonance with the brand, and the prompt to make a customer act were lacking across the body of commercial work. Maybe this is why WPP just announced a renewed focus on the craft of creativity.

One exception resonated with me: Rocket/“Be My Neighbor”. A true human insight that evoked an emotional response in a film that was beautifully produced. It made me love the brand a little bit more and almost made me want to sell my house and move. Not everyone is in the market to move houses today, but they’ll likely remember this brand on the day that they do. This is what advertisers should do to leverage the massive platform of the Super Bowl: learn from Rocket and their CMO, Jonathan Mildenhall.

One last call out is for Coinbase. The lowest production quality Super Bowl ad of the last forty years, but it stood out in the context of its surroundings. A message to marketers: it is not just the picture that is painted but also the frame and place in which it is hanging that attracts attention.