1. The Sorry State Of Super Bowl Advertising
Have you ever seen a Punch and Judy show?
It was a popular form of entertainment in Dickens’ England, a puppet show that used stock characters, often to skewer leading figures and institutions of the day.
I ask because that is what this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads reminded me of: a form of popular entertainment from an earlier era, a historical curiosity notable for how anachronistic it seems today.
That’s because in this era of Feudal Media, television commercials are no longer the cultural touchpoints they were ten or twenty years ago. They’re just background noise, either seen way too often thanks to faulty targeting or barely at all.
Worse still, this year’s Super Bowl output seemed to all blend together: major stars pitching processed snack foods you knew never touched their lips, prosaic paeans to a mythical past interspersed with trailers for upcoming movies and NBC/Peacock series while everyone in America waited for the Bad Bunny Show, the game itself being an exercise in tedium.
Why It Matters
The Super Bowl Ad, that colossally expensive extravaganza stuffed with high level celebrities and elbow-in-the-ribs sight gags, has become a parody of itself.
There were a few that mattered: Serena Williams for one of those GLPs that may well prove to be a miracle drug, and the Anthropic spots bashing OpenAI. (But mostly because of Sam Altman’s hyperbolic reaction to them, and only within the world of people-who-care-about-tech.)
But that was about it.
The hundreds of millions spent convincing the likes of George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, Matthew McConaughey, Adrien Brody and Ben Affleck to appear in ads was mostly for naught, their presence unlikely to have any real impact on consumers’ perception of whatever sugar-saturated snack food or undifferentiated web service they were shilling for.
Though none of that is likely to have an impact on brands who are still busy chasing the now 42-year old glory of the Apple “1984” commercial that brought the Super Bowl Ad as a genre to prominence.
And yet…the Super Bowl is still the only way to reach over 100 million Americans with the same message all at the same time.
Meaning it’s a powerful forum and will continue to remain one as audiences become more and more scattered and fragmented across the media ecosystem.
It’s also a way to reach them with the emotional impact of sight, sound and motion on the big screen. Something an Instagram ad can’t really do.
For brands whose audience is “anyone with a mouth” or “anyone with a smartphone” that is going to be a powerful lure and so it’s unlikely that the appeal of Super Bowl ads will dissipate any time soon—if anything, their value is more likely to rise.
So decades more of the world’s top acting talent imbuing meaning and emotion to lines like “they’re just the creamiest!”
Fortunately, it’s just one night a year.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a brand advertiser, please, for love of all that is holy, stop insisting your agencies find celebrities you want to hang out with to star in your spots.
I mean it’s not like George Clooney needs the money.
Wrap your heads around the notion that when every other advertiser in the game is running essentially the same spot, your version is not going to stand out.
And that when people tell the USA Today Ad Meter they like the Budweiser spots best, it’s because they think that liking a heartwarming slice of nostalgic Americana reflects well on them as a human being, not that they are going to actually stop buying craft IPAs.
If you are an ad agency, please stop enabling your clients.
The problem—as you well know—is that people will remember the celebrity or the gag but not the brand. This has long been a problem for TV commercials—I remember seeing studies back in the day that a sizable number of people thought the Energizer Bunny was, in fact, the Eveready Bunny and thus rewarded the wrong brand of battery.
And in the case of Super Bowl ads, you’ll be lucky if they even remember the larger category.
So there’s that too.
If you’re a viewer, enjoy the nostalgia trip—it’s not likely to ebb anytime soon. Tell your kids and grandkids about the days when television commercials mattered, when everyone knew what “Where’s The Beef?” or “Have It Your Way” referred to.
If you can tear them away from their phones long enough that is.
2. iSpot Gives Creative Agencies A Secret Weapon
iSpot, which got its start cataloging TV commercials many years ago, has returned to its roots with a new tool called SAGE that uses agentic AI to analyze TV commercials and their effectiveness.
The tool goes through a brand’s own ads (or a competitor’s ads) to determine themes and other characteristics and then provides analysis of how those factors performed.
It’s meant to help agencies and brands develop better and more effective creative by providing insights into what works and what does not.
By doing the same for competitive creative, it can also help brands figure out where and how to zig when everyone else is zagging.
Why It Matters
A Porsche designed by committee is a Toyota.
I forget where I first heard that, but it’s a truism that’s stuck with me throughout my career as everyone from clients to GPTs have attempted to flatten out or take the edges off something I’d written.
And while it is easy to see certain agencies using SAGE to do just that—create a Franken-ad of the best-performing elements, it is not what the product is designed for.
Rather, it’s designed to help agencies strategize within a human-created framework—here is our campaign, what’s the best call-to-action, which product attributes should we emphasize, what is the emotional response, can we customize the ads for different audiences to create better outcomes—that sort of thing.
It is a fascinating program too, the sort of thing you can easily lose hours playing with, as the results often defy your own expectations of what will resonate or what will confuse. As such, it should prove to be invaluable in the planning stages—what do we want to focus on, what are our competitors not focusing on.
It’s also a good addition to a gut check—we think people know what X is, but do they really? Is it that they’ve never heard of it or that they think it’s something else?
But the thing is, as AI advances, we are going to see more products that are able to break down something subjective, like a TV commercial or a movie script, and determine what elements align with audience expectations and preferences. And then it will tell you that it can help you write the perfect script.
Which is a really bad idea because those perfect scripts are bound to fail.
I know this because we’ve tried this before.
Only without data.
You see, Hollywood is littered with the remains of projects that had the most talented actors, the most award-winning screenwriters, the hottest directors, multimillion dollar budgets and a ton of hype… only to crash and burn because the end product did nothing for audiences.
While a show based on a series of fantasy novels beloved by Dungeons and Dragons players featuring a cast of unknown European actors created by two guys who had zero experience as showrunners became a massive hit.
This is not as surprising as it might seem.
Creativity is, at its core, the defiance of expectations. Of showing people that they like things they didn’t think they’d like.
It rarely tests well—word of mouth is key and it takes some time to catch on.
But ultimately it does and suddenly there is something new and different and audiences love it and the magic that led to its success is now out in the universe, never to be harnessed or recaptured again.
Ever.
As in don’t even try.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are iSpot, take a bow. SAGE is a well-designed, well-thought out tool that is a lot of fun to play with, especially if you are in any way curious about data. (I will admit to having a blast when CEO Sean Muller took me through it. So many “what if” scenarios to explore.)
If you are involved in any sort of creative project—TV commercials, TV shows, movies, microdramas—remember that these are great tools to understand audiences and to understand what else is out there.
But actually creating something that breaks through? That’s got to come from you, from taking these insights and figuring out how to use them to tell a really great story. Without any guardrails.
Because especially in today’s Feudal Media landscape, passion is going to beat out relevance and creating something that makes people feel should continue to be your goal.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.