The significance of this year’s annual Superbowl advertising showcase is perhaps not as it seems. The industry takeaway has undoubtedly been that there was an unprecedented number of celebrity appearances, and there were (to an unprecedented degree), with the highest-earning entertainers in the world (and their agents) clearly making hay while the Arizona sun shone. Ben Affleck, Serena Williams, Dave Grohl, Peyton Manning, Melissa McCarthy, Will Ferrell, Steve Martin, Alicia Silverstone, Bryan Cranston, John (Hamm and Travolta). The list is endless but what does this tell us?
Celebrities controlling the Superbowl ads creatively
We have known for years that putting products into the hands of expensive talent works well and potentially more demonstrably than other approaches. In the same way that Tom Cruise (about the only actor not in an ad this year) delivers a measurable box office return, so Ferrell and Co can be presented to clients as a guaranteed return on a considerable investment.
“But what will they be doing?” - asks the client, and here is the problem:
The ideas (remember them?) become dictated by what the celebrity and their agent are willing to agree to do. Creatively, the tail wags the very expensive dog. Alicia Silverstone reboots her Clueless performance, Travolta revisits T-Birds for T-Mobile, and Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul break old ground cooking-up popcorn in their mobile meth van. The pattern begins to reveal itself with brands looking backward, in a star-studded postmodern visual jukebox of self-referential borrowed interest.
The significant thing about this year’s Superbowl ad break is not the plethora of famous faces, it’s the noticeable absence of juicy creative ideas.
In rewatching the spots you can clearly see that most of the concepts are entirely dictated by the casting decision. At $7 million per 30 seconds, one could argue that there are about seven million reasons why it makes sense to play it safe, but with such a huge and engaged audience (for once not able to skip blithely past your ad), the internationally celebrated Superbowl still represents an unmissable opportunity to show the western world what you are about and to potentially make advertising history.
Take these three classics:
