2020 marks the fourth anniversary of my Super Bowl commercial recap blog post here at Rampant Discourse. With four years down, we’ve rotated around through all of the hosting channels, NBC, ABC and for both 2020 and 2017, FOX.
Having run this blog for a number of years now, I’ve gotten familiar with the trends. Every year has its own trends, but the generic trends of Super Bowl ads on network television are unlikely to change any time soon.
15-20% of the ads will be for shows on the network. The hosting network uses all of the eyes of the SuperBowl to try to spark interest in their normal programmed offerings. Last year, CBS actually pushed this to slightly over 22%!
Somewhere around 5% of the ads shown will be for upcoming movies. Another 5% will be for alcoholic beverages. And up to 10% will be for cars. There are also the common and expected advertisers: Tide, and other Proctor and Gamble, Doritos and Budweiser are all bound to show up.
For an event where so many people are paying attention for the specific purpose of watching new and interesting commercials, it’s actually a little surprising how formulaic it all is. But it seems to work, because it has remained consistent even as the NFL has not always put a consistent product on the field, and even in the face of new technology.
That new technology intrigued me. Earlier in the playoffs I randomly turned to my phone to check the score of a playoff game that was occurring that I wasn’t watching. NFL.com was happy to let me watch the game, live, on my phone with no additional verification. When I went to my desktop to get more comfortable, it demanded I provide information about my non-existent TV package. This shows the move that the NFL, among other major corporations are making to get the mobile market locked up. The NFL was even advertising, “Free Phone Football” via their app. For me, no need to install the app. I watched, on my phone, right from my browser.
Because of that experience, I decided to watch the Super Bowl in a similar fashion. I sat down at my desk and watched the whole game, including the commercials, on my tablet. I was curious to see how the marketing and commercials would work in this new environment. There might be a completely different set of commercials There are always local market commercials, or host station commercials, those wouldn’t be available for my tablet. But maybe there would be additional changes. For the most part, that didn’t change, but here’s the best and most significant of what I saw.
- Headline Numbers
- 113 Commercials
- 13 were for the NFL as a product/idea, the NFL Network or shows/events on the NFL Network.
- 13 were for shows/events on FOX.
- Combined, those two categories are an even bigger group than CBS’ last year, but the lack of local channel commercials is probably the reason.
- 5 were trailers for upcoming movies.
- 8 were for automobiles. This is in line with previous years, although a bit lower. It’s likely lower because I didn’t see a single manufacturer repeat this year.
There were some shakeups as well, though. New category this year is a refrain from 2017. The political ad. In 2017, I made note of how many of the ads, even non-political in nature normally, were referencing the events of 2016’s Presidential Election. Well, 2020’s election campaign is well under way so we had a pair of ads for those campaigns.
We’re also three years in on Alexa smart speaker ads being a big deal, so that can be a trend. And nostalgia was back big with ads playing to the 1980s and 1990s on a fairly regular basis. Most notably Wal*Mart, Cheetos, Michelob, and Jeep.
My personal favorite commercial of the evening came early, courtesy of Snickers.
Everyone seems to agree that the world is “out of sorts.” So what’s a candy company supposed to do? Acknowledge it and attack it with some humor. It’s remarkably political for being not in the least political, and strikes a great balance of realist humor and absurdist black comedy. The best commercials are timeless, and it’s not clear this one will work if times aren’t quite so bleak, but it probably would. We always think things are worse now than they were before–even when they’re demonstrably better. So there’ll always be a market for this ad.
Early commercials get more eyeballs and frequently more attention. If you want a spot, you probably want an early commercial. So when Rocket Mortgage asked Jason Momoa to be in their early first quarter Super Bowl ad, he had to think it was going to be good.
Tom Brady turned some heads in his Hulu ad by playing with expectations. I recommended to him a few years ago that he should retire then, after a Super Bowl win, and go out on top. He decided not to, and has kept playing, and has an extra ring as a result. And he’s not leaving yet. But he made us think so for just a moment.
Combining brands is always a bit tricky, but several commericals did it well this year. Perhaps the best example was Pringle’s borrowing Rick and Morty.
Speaking of combining brands, P&G (formerly known as Proctor and Gamble) decided to give everyone a peek behind our thin veil of corporatism by demonstrating just how much of the marketplace they really control.
Given that Olay (Oil of Olay) had a massive commercial earlier in the game and Tide (another P&G product) had an ongoing run of commercials which they intermingled with ImBev (Budweiser) and others, it’s safe to say that P&G feels pretty good about that whole ‘working together.’ For me, though, it was a reminder that I need to re-read Jennifer Government.
Budweiser’s “Typical Americans” spot did well, even if it still won’t get me to drink their typically subpar beer. It’s fun to play with stereotypes.
Jeep pulled off a real coup in getting Bill Murray to reprise this role for a television commercial. He’s known to be somewhat hard to get to do much of anything these days. The commercial is also a lot of fun, and ties in nicely with a lot of my thoughts recently about that movie and the movies of the 1990s in general.
Even my wife, who was in the room but not paying attention to the game or the commercials at all heard this one and asked about it. “Sounded like they got the original Ned Ryerson, too.” Yup, they sure did.
It’s hard to imagine that commercial selling too many Jeeps, but it was a good commercial all the same.
