With 36-plus million U.S. households — more than one in four U.S. homes — tuning into the Super Bowl, brands that can afford to spend around $6.5 million for the average 30-second spot enjoy an unprecedented opportunity to communicate directly with a wide swath of consumers.
They also face unprecedented scrutiny and expectations, knowing full well that many media outlets will thoroughly and often brutally review their ads. At least those that weren’t already previewed in the week prior to the Super Bowl (a trend that diminishes the excitement of revealing Super Bowl commercials.)
Each year, I come to my opinions both as a longtime former global ad man and a longtime purpose-led brand consultant. So, my reviews encompass both traditional advertising as well as the new era of purposeful storytelling I call, Lead With We.
This involves a radical reimagining and reengineering of business — and the advertising that makes it possible — based on the idea of collectivized purpose, showing how we live, work, and grow together in new ways that restore and protect the social and living systems on which all our futures depend.
As such, Lead With We commercials focus on a company’s fundamental purpose (why it exists, rather than what it does or makes alone), and its role and impact on real people in the real world. It’s storytelling more than selling, and movement-making more than marketing.
As wider context, for the first time in human history we have together created a confluence of crises — environmental, economic, and sociopolitical — that threaten our own survival. And during the recent pandemic, we all learned firsthand that when those of us in influential positions, e.g., business leaders and consumers, exert a massive, shared effort, there is little we can’t achieve. We must now extend the urgent and necessary response we undertook in the face of Covid-19, to solve our other, equally imperative challenges, starting with the climate emergency and economic inequality.
Today’s companies more than ever should take advantage of the opportunity and rising demand on the consumer’s part that their favorite brands communicate with them directly about the things they care about most. That’s what I’m looking for in a blockbuster ad.
On that front, the Super Bowl commercials this year contrasted recent years that featured more purpose-led ads. As such, most brands failed to leverage a large global platform at a critical inflection point in human history.
I’d go so far as to argue it’s not just a missed opportunity, but negligent for companies and brands not to communicate their impact, problem-solving, and goals and aspirations. Failing to showcase business in general as a powerful and necessary force for good.
But many companies did understand a few fundamental new rules:
- Brands should share the positive impact they are co-creating with their customers to inspire them to buy their product and build their business with them.
- Brands must position themselves as the celebrant, rather than celebrity, of their communities to ensure they don’t seem self-serving, and viewers engage with and share their commercials.
- Brands should position their efforts as part of a larger movement to solve pressing problems or needs most relevant to consumer’s lives.
Celebrity is not a silver bullet and over-production can lead to dense and confusing storytelling. For those reasons and the new rules outlined above, here are commercials that stood out in the mix:
Toyota
The global brand has succeeded before in showcasing athletes overcoming hardship, although it’s also faced criticism for featuring disabled people triumphing over adversity. This year’s 60-second ad was a simple, compelling, well-told story of brothers Brian and Robin McKeever, who teamed up to train Robin to win 10 paralympic skiing medals after he contracted a degenerative eye condition. It’s a human — not a brand-centric story, likely unknown to most viewers. Heart-wrenching in terms of the struggle the brothers endured to reach their goal of Olympic gold — and seen in part through Robin’s (disconcertingly blurry) POV. It’s a powerful demonstration of a true story conveyed in emotional but not saccharine terms that best of all aligned entirely with a core purpose of Toyota, to take on challenging goals, aim high, and work and achieve together.
Hologic
The women-focused medical tech company leveraged hip hop icon Mary J. Blige to promote the importance of breast cancer screening (perhaps especially to women of color, who are more likely to miss regular screenings). Yes, Blige is a celebrity’s celebrity — but the 60-second ad depicts her as busy, stressed, and anxious about her breast cancer status. It’s an important demonstration of how a brand can utilize a celebrity’s platform to scale its reach in service of a powerful preventative message. The ad has nearly no dialog but ends with Blige telling her doctor, “See you next year,” driving home a simple but crucial message about the consistency of testing.
Coinbase
The 60-second ad featured a bright, bouncing QR code, which when scanned, directed viewers to the online app, offering $15 in Bitcoin to those who register for an account within 48 hours. The typical Super Bowl ad tends to be narrative- and character-driven, celebrity-centric, complex, and condensed into a short period of time (thirty or sixty seconds). Coinbase’s QR code was instead hugely disruptive not only for its simplicity but its interactivity. It was powerful because it demonstrated live — with the viewer in the driver’s seat — the ease with which somebody can acquire cryptocurrencies, essentially shifting thinking, action, and culture all in one fell swoop. In fact, the ad was so successful that the Coinbase app crashed for about an hour from overuse. In short, Coinbase leveraged the huge Super Bowl platform to democratize the reach and use of virtual currencies, cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain more broadly — in a single minute that might one day seem as pivotal as some early Apple spots.
Salesforce
The US cloud-based software company Salesforce used a more traditional 60-second spot to communicate a powerful message that transcended standard selling. It employed a recognizable character, Matthew McConaughey, to thumb its nose at other billionaires and their companies and industries that have garnered much-earned media of late owing to their aspirations of an extraplanetary future for humanity. The ad provides a timely and creative reinforcement of an important and widely-shared philosophy: “Some folks these days are fascinated with the metaverse and Mars. But here on #TeamEarth, we have our gaze fixed a little closer to home. We believe that business is the greatest platform for change, and success should be for everyone on Earth and the planet itself. Because of the new frontier? It’s right here.” So, Salesforce is arguing that we ought to protect the endangered Earth before we go soaring off to populate — and probably pollute — another home. The hashtag #TeamEarth is a self-evident tool that will unlock much opportunity across other media channels, with multiple varieties of related content, aimed at different audiences around the world to celebrate the restoration and regeneration of the planet. This is an important and consistent message when you consider the public and vocal role that CEO Mark Benioff has been playing for some years, most notably at Davos, where in 2020 he declared that capitalism, as we know it, is dead.
Google’s Pixel 6 camera commercial featuring musician Lizzo was compelling not only because it sufficiently demonstrated the “Real Tone” feature that its new camera software provides, but because it also shows how meaningful such a feature is in the real lives of those with skin tones other than white. “The brand’s 60-second spot opens with a series of poorly shot photographs of people of color, their faces obscured or shaded as various narrators express how cameras never seem to capture them properly,” Adweek writes. I’m impressed by this ad (and product) for two main reasons: Probably every person of color understands this as a real problem. But also, likely 99 percent of all White people don’t even know this problem exists. Google gives both groups a meaningful product that will surely play a powerful role in all lives by honoring and enhancing the memories that mean the most to all of us.
GM
GM’s 60-second “EVerybody In Now” spot, reprises the villainous cast of the “Austin Powers” franchise to promote its electric vehicle (EV) line. Having infiltrated GM’s Detroit headquarters, Dr. Evil schemes to take over the world, but his henchpeople convince him to instead first deal with the climate emergency — “arguably the №1 threat to the world now.” Dr. Evil will do it — albeit only to reclaim the top spot. The commercial leverages the wide and popular cultural appeal of “Austin Powers” to ensure GM’s message — “Everybody In! We’re going all electric!” — will grab people’s attention and keep them engaged, all the while engendering affection, loyalty, and interest for the brand. It reminds me of the early Mac v. PC commercials of the mid-aughts, where Mac guy was the obvious cool one.
Hellmann’s
It was also heartening to see the Unilever brand continue to tackle food waste (“Make Taste, Not Waste”) by leveraging NFL coach, a former linebacker, and conveniently named Jerod Mayo. “If you’re thinking of throwing away food — remember, there’s always Mayo!” Mayo literally knocks some sense into us — through SNL star Pete Davidson — in terms of how we can waste less food. What’s so powerful about this commercial is that it shows the rising role brands are playing not just in making better products (doing less bad and more good), but in nondidactically educating consumers about new attitudes and behaviors. Such brands, I like to say, are “walking the talk,” and Unilever’s going out of its way over the past few years to rid itself of all non-purposeful brands.
KIA
The recently troubled Korean carmaker offers a thrilling modern tale of a “boy and his [robot] dog” to highlight its all-electric Kia EV6. It’s a very effective demonstration of how well a simple, engaging, charming, and emotional narrative story can convey a purpose-based message (“Movement that inspires”). It helps to have an appealing everyman and adorable “dog” as protagonists — and a well-choreographed Hollywood chase dimension.
The Halftime Show
Viewed by 29 million people, the star-studded halftime show — perhaps especially now the NFL is beginning to confront its internal racism — was a “commercial” in and of itself, for the diversity the league is lacking at the top. Eminem’s taking a knee in solidary with Colin Kaepernick sent a definite message about the reckoning the NFL is about to undergo.
Extrapolating from this list, three tentpole strategies that inform these successful Super Bowl ads — and which are notably absent in the “fumbles” — are as follows:
- Brands need to position their products or services as social proof of the foundational purpose of the company.
- Brand loyalty is built when all stakeholders are given a meaningful role to play in a movement larger than themselves.
- Brands that self-disrupt and position themselves as solutions to a challenged future will benefit from fresh relevance to young demographics, emerging market forces that reward positive impact, and a growing number of stakeholders that want to invest in, work for and buy from companies that are doing good.
Do you agree? And here’s to more brands and commercials that Lead With We in next year’s Super Bowl.