Stealing from the Super Bowl

Screengrab from Bubly ad.

From a creative perspective, the craft and budgets given to these ads give me a rumble in my jungle. From a strategic perspective, I am excited to see the results. The overall picture is positive. These ads seem to work and drive sales. Yaaaay, go team advertising.

So, hi btw., I am Lucas and I like Super Bowl ads.

Now, what can we as South Africans learn from this carnival of capitalist creativity?

Lesson one: The expectation of the audience

Everyone is looking forward to the ads. The audience's expectations are high, so the clients’ expectations are high. It feels as though the audience is pushing the quality up. It's not business as usual - it's the Super Bowl! Wouldn't it be great to train our audiences to expect great communication more often? A few brands have created this expectation. Nandos comes to mind immediately.

Lesson 2: You can throw money at it

More money. More celebrity. More attention. Daaammn, those guys had Steve Carrel and Cardi B doing a confusing Pepsi or Coke commercial. Oh shiiit, that's Michael Bublé selling a bubbly drink. Oh wow, Amazon has everyone I have ever seen on TV in their ad.

Lesson 3: We can box smarter

Less money, more tactical. When you can't or don't want to outspend the competition. Skittles made its own Broadway musical to usurp the Super Bowl, and Volvo wanted to encourage and reward the Super Bowl audience to not watch the games but to just pay attention to their mobile game. Both are fucking great ideas.

These last 2 examples are my favourites. The lesson to be learnt here is: you can be clever, creative and calculated. At a fraction of the cost of the competitors. Skittles and Volvo were able to take advantage of this frenzy of ad spend.

This is something we can all relate to. Budgets are lower and we should lean into it. These are great examples of forcing attention vs. earning attention. They both have merits, but there is something wonderfully unfair about the last 2.

To quote David Trott:

Creativity may well be the last legal unfair competitive advantage we can take to run over the competition.