The Cultural Impact of the 2020 Super Bowl
The biggest trends related to media and technology, and what brand marketers can learn from the cultural event
The 54th Super Bowl took place on Sunday night. As the biggest television event in the U,S., it drew in 102 million live viewers across platforms, which is about one percent higher than last year, and generated a record $435 million in in-game ad revenue for host network Fox. Live sports events are the last bastion of live TV, and the Super Bowl is no doubt the strongest of all cultural spectacles to unite the American audience. Even if you don’t particularly care for football, you’d be watching for the halftime show, the big-budget commercials, or just a good reason to party with friends.
However, this is 2020, and the monoculture created by mass media is rapidly breaking down and being eroded by time-shifted viewing and personalized media diets. Young people are watching less live television and spending less time hanging out with friends in person, both possibly contributing to the 7% drop in Super Bowl viewership among adults 18 to 34 compared to last year. To counter this trend of media and culture fragmentation, Fox did everything it could to make sure that cord-cutters could easily watch the game online (and watch the ads!), and brands continue to leverage social channels to make sure their “big-game” spots are seen by non-viewers too.
There is little doubt of the cultural impact the Super Bowl still holds over the public consciousness. During cultural events of this caliber, social channels tend to become amplifiers rather than distractions. The NFL did not upload the halftime show to YouTube until the next day, but memes of Shakira wiggling her tongue were all over social media before the game was over. Monolithic live events like the Super Bowl are a dying breed — just look at the record low ratings for the Grammys this year — and every year, it serves as a rare opportunity to gauge the U.S. cultural zeitgeist.
Here are some of the biggest trends related to media and technology that we saw reflected in this year’s Super Bowl.
Reaching for the Cord-Cutters
Catering to the changing viewer behavior, Fox decided to make this year’s Super Bowl broadcast available for streaming on FoxSports.com, as well as the Fox Sports, Fox Now and NFL apps on most OTT streaming devices. Unlike previous years, there was no need for cable TV subscription, thus eliminating the friction of authentication and making the livestream easily accessible for free even for the cord-cutters and cord-nevers. At a time when 45% of American viewers primarily watch TV via online streaming services, this is obviously a right move for Fox to grab the most eyeballs possible.
Funnily enough, despite Fox’s conscientious effort to reach cord-cutters, some of them almost didn’t get to stream the big game on their TV sets. On Thursday, Roku, the second most popular streaming platform in the US after Amazon Fire TV, reportedly got into a “carriage dispute” with Fox over negotiation of their distribution agreement, likely over the split of ad revenues. Roku threatened to pull all Fox channels off its platform, which would’ve effectively cut off an easy way for over 32 million Roku users to livestream the Super Bowl. Fortunately, by Friday, Roku and Fox reached an agreement and avoided a potential debacle.
It’s also worth mentioning that this was the first year that the game was available for streaming in 4K HDR for free, following the steady rise of 4K TV adoption over the past few years. Considering that many people would go to a Super Bowl party, perhaps this game was the first time some viewers were exposed to a 4K viewing experience. And even if a fraction of them walked away impressed by what they saw, it could be beneficial to scaling the 4K TV adoption.
The Spoils of Streaming Wars
Because we are in the middle of an arms race between various streaming services, old and new who are trying to grab audience attention and share of wallet, many of them couldn’t possibly pass up the biggest advertising platform that the U.S. media industry has to offer as they try to sell live audiences on their streaming services.
Disney aired a spot promoting the upcoming Marvel series on Disney+ and another one for Hulu featuring star quarterback Tom Brady, aimed to promote Hulu’s live TV product. Quibi, the upcoming short-form premium video service, aired a 30-second spot that attempted to introduce itself to the Super Bowl audience to not-so-great results, given that Twitter was filled with people saying they still didn’t get what Quibi was after the spot aired.
Amazon also returned to the big game for a third consecutive year to promote its Prime Video service. Unlike Disney and Quibi, whose ad spots focused on brand-building and raising awareness, Amazon held on to its strategy of promoting a single upcoming tentpole release to attract potential viewers. This year, the featured series was a Nazi-hunting thriller starring Al Pacino called Hunters that will debut on February 21. This strategy reflects the fact that, despite all of the awards Amazon has been winning recently for superb comedies like The Marvelous Mrs. Masiel and Fleabag, Prime Video still lacks a prestige drama of the cultural-phenomenon caliber, a la Game of Thrones or The Handmaid’s Tale. Don’t be surprised to see a Super Bowl spot next year for its upcoming big-budget Lord of the Rings series.
A Concerted Push for Electric Vehicles
As with previous years, auto brands took up a big portion of the Super Bowl commercials. This year, however, marked the first time four automakers shelled out the big bucks to promote their electric vehicles (EVs). This is an interesting indication of a shifting focus for the auto industry, which, studies have shown, has so far spent significantly fewer ad dollars on pushing EVs than gas or hybrid vehicles.
Audi’s E-Tron commercial featured Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams singing the Frozen earworm “Let It Go” to urge people to let go of their gas-guzzling cars. GM relaunched the power car staple Hummer as an EV brand with a 30-second ad featuring Lebron James. Porsche aimed to entertain with a car dealership heist-themed spot that highlighted its new Taycan EV model while Ford repurposed a sleek video spot featuring Idris Elba that was first released in November to introduce the Mustang Mach-E to the Super Bowl audience.
Super Bowl ads are a bellwether of our cultural zeitgeist, and this concerted push for EVs reflects a broader sense of growing public eco-consciousness and increasing demand for more sustainable products. As auto brands start to increase their EV marketing budgets, consumer awareness about EVs will likely rise proportionally, which, in turn, should help accelerate EV adoption in the U.S.
Outside the EV cohort, advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) also made a Super Bowl appearance in a wickedly funny Hyundai commercial featuring John Krasinski, Chris Evans and Rachel Dratch remarking, with comically thick Boston accents, on a new “Smart Park” feature for the (non-electric) Sonata that automatically parks the car for you.
Two Ways to Sell Voice Assistants
As with the past three years, both Google and Amazon returned to the Super Bowl to promote their respective voice assistants, with starkly distinct creative strategies that, upon a closer look, reveal how awfully similar the two tech giants aim to position voice assistants.
Keeping up with its celebrity-heavy Super Bowl strategy, Amazon’s Alexa spot this year featured Ellen Degeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi in a whimsical ad that showed a fantastical montage of people throughout history asking their servants and friends (and a carrier pigeon) for things typically asked of Alexa today — to tell a joke, play a tune, send a message, etc. The underlying message is clear: Alexa is both a dutiful servant that will do your bidding and a trustworthy friend that will keep you informed and entertained.
In contrast to the playful tone of the Alexa spot, Google went for the tear-jerking button with its Super Bowl spot for Google Assistant. In a 90-second spot titled “Loretta,” a senior widower who presumably suffers from memory loss, used Google Assistant to keep the memory of his late wife alive, accompanied by a sentimental piano score seemingly inspired by that infamously sad track from Pixar’s Up. Similar to last year’s 100 Billion Words spot, which highlighted the instant translation feature of Google Assistant, Google once again zoomed in on a little-known feature to tout the usefulness and trustworthiness of its virtual assistant while also showcasing how integral its services have become in our daily lives.
Reactions to this spot were rather polarized. Some found it touching and heartwarming; others found it creepy and vaguely dystopian that not only we are turning to a virtual assistant made of uncaring algorithms for emotional support, but also willingly handing over the most precious of our personal details and memories to a company that thrives on data collection. Nevertheless, the spot was as effective as it was emotionally manipulative, standing out especially in a year when most brands leaned into humor instead of heartstring-plucking.
Brands Leaning into Nostalgia
Besides humor, brand advertisers also leaned heavily into nostalgia to, as AdWeek puts it, “distract the audience from a tense, divisive political and cultural climate.” Some brands opted to incorporate references to old movies, such as Jeep’s well-received ad featuring Bill Murray reprising his character in Groundhog Day (1993), and Facebook using a Rocky (1976) reference to promote Facebook Groups. Website building service Squarespace’s ad, which sent Winona Ryder to Winona, Minnesota, called back to 1996’s Fargo, while Mountain Dew paid a winking tribute to The Shining (1980). Besides the movie references, some ad spots also featured hit songs from the 1990s, such as Cheetos using MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” to promote its new popcorn.
While these cultural references came out before today’s younger audiences were born and are likely lost on them (unless they are big movie fans), to anyone that grew up with these classic movies and songs, they serve as a cultural touchstone, or rather, a shortcut for brands to quickly connect with the audience. With Millennials growing into the leading consumer demographic, the songs and movies we used to enjoy in our youth are naturally becoming commercial backgrounds. In a way, this tactic of leaning into nostalgia underscores the challenges that brands face when it comes to a high-noise event like the Super Bowl.
What Savvy Brands Did
Culture now spreads at the speed of social, which means it is easier to make a splash, yet much harder for anyone to stand out with a sustained hype. Trying to manufacture a meme, as Planters tried to do by killing off its mascot Mr. Peanut and then resurrecting it as Baby Nut (a blatant aping of Baby Yoda), would come off as more opportunistic than strategic, and today’s savvy consumers can smell the inauthenticity and ignore it accordingly.
Instead, the most strategic brands are the ones that had a holistic strategy in mind to anticipate what would happen once the Super Bowl ads aired. For example, brands such as Coca-Cola, Reese’s, and Pop-Tarts were among the brands that took the initiative to ensure their Amazon product pages showed up on top in their corresponding Google search results, and that their online inventories were properly stocked, thus allowing them to successfully convert the Super Bowl hype into sales.
In addition, some brands also leveraged social media to amplify their Super Bowl campaign. For example, besides the usual clips posted to Twitter and Instagram, Mountain Dew went one step further and created a branded effect on TikTok that users can incorporate into their videos. Similarly, Hyundai produced a series of TikTok videos that stars Rachel Dratch reprising the same role she did in the aforementioned Super Bowl spot. Since it is hard to sustain the hype in one place in today’s fragmented media landscape, the next best bet for brand marketers is to make sure your brand shows up everywhere. The Super Bowl is still no doubt a big event, but live TV — or really, TV itself in all forms — is hardly the best place to reach everybody any more.
