Top Trends We Saw From This Year’s Super Bowl Ads
How the most expensive ads of the year reflected our 2018 Outlook
On Sunday night, Super Bowl LII captured the nation’s attention and delivered the biggest TV event of the year for viewers and advertisers. With NBC reportedly charging $5 million per 30 seconds of commercial run-time, the brands that shelled out the big bucks certainly put a lot of thought and effort into their spots that warrant a closer look. (Business Insider compiled a comprehensive list of all the brand ads that ran nationally on Sunday night in case you missed the live game.)
Super Bowl ads often serve as a mirror on the key trends of the U.S. market and consumer culture, and this year, we see multiple trends that we highlighted in our 2018 Outlook report reflected in a number of Super Bowl ads. Let’s take look at them one by one.
The Big Picture
We believe that 2018 marks the end of the beginning phase of the internet, and as a result, tech-driven disruption is coming to every corner of every industry. The changes are fundamentally enabled and driven by tech companies, but the effects have little to do with the technology itself and everything to do with consumer behaviors and expectations.
This trend of industry-wide disruption is most evident not in an individual ad spot, but rather the overall viewership of the Super Bowl. While the Super Bowl is still the biggest TV event of the year in the States by a huge lead, this year marks a 7-year low in terms of its live ratings, with adults 18–49 down 10% and total viewers down 8%. Overall 7 million fewer people watched NBC’S broadcast of Super Bowl LII on NBC than last year. However, the network’s streaming platform pulled in over 2 million viewers, making it the most streamed Super Bowl ever. Overall, the viewership is still in sharp decline, which could largely be attributed to not only a changing U.S. demographic, but also accelerating cord-cutting and growing competition from esports. Whatever the reasons might be, there is little doubt that the shifting viewer behavior and media attention facilitated by digital channels have had an impact on the Super Bowl.
Digital Culture
For the first theme in our 2018 Outlook, we start with an exploration of the huge impact that digital platforms have had in our life. The cultural and political events that transpired in 2017 underscores that there is no longer a separation of “internet” and “real life” — all culture is now digital culture, and that, by definition, means that it’s changing the way we consume culture and media products.
For one, the rising popularity of over-the-top streaming services is changing the way we consume entertainment content. This year, all major streaming services, including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Go, YouTube TV all bought spots to promote their original content. Among them, Netflix made a particularly ballsy move by putting out a Super Bowl ad for Cloverfield Paradox, a new sequel in the Cloverfield franchise that Netflix purchased from Paramount for more than $50 million, and making the movie available immediately after the game ends, thus offering viewers an alternative to NBC’s post-game episode of its hit show This Is Us and upending the typical release and promotional windowing strategy. In contrast, Amazon Prime Video made its Super Bowl debut with a trailer for its upcoming Jack Ryan series, which is set to debut on Labor Day weekend, as the service continues to strive for a mass-appeal hit to drive sign-ups.
Netflix made a ballsy move by putting out a Super Bowl ad for Cloverfield Paradox and making it available immediately after the game ends, thus offering viewers an alternative to NBC’s post-game episode of This Is Us
Another good example of how the digital sphere is subsuming our non-digital culture activities can be seen in the Super Bowl ads for HQ Trivia that aired shortly before and after the game. As the latest breakout mobile phenomenon, HQ Trivia, a live trivia game app with cash prizes, works like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” for everyone to play on their phone. The game that HQ Trivia hosted on Sunday night during the halftime break featured a prize pool of $20,000 and no doubt lured some viewers away from the TV screen. It’s worth noting that HQ Trivia got those ad spots for free thanks to their relationship with Comcast, which further signifying a emerging convergence of traditional media and digital upstarts. Ally Bank is another company that smartly leveraged mobile to reach Super Bowl viewers by launching an AR-enable mobile game that people could play during commercial breaks to earn money and win prizes.
Of course, one continuing manifestation of digital culture in Super Bowl ads this year is the incorporation of internet memes into the game day spots. Wendy’s jokingly brought their Twitter feud with McDonald’s to their Super Bowl spot while the ad that Squarespace ran featuring Keanu Reeves cleverly subverted the popular “sad Keanu” meme with an equally meme-worthy image. Then there’s Wix, a Squarespace competitor that joined Super Bowl at the last minute with a spot featuring two major YouTube stars Rhett & Link.
As all these examples aptly show, the line between what is regarded as “traditional media” and “new media” is increasingly converging, and it would be rather futile and unproductive for brands to think of digital culture as its own separate entity.
Smart Home
In our 2018 Outlook, we highlighted the brewing battle among the tech giants over owning the future of smart home platform, examined the advantages and weaknesses that the three leading companies, Amazon, Google, and Apple, respectively has in this burgeoning sector, and explored what the result of this battle would potentially mean for brands. On Sunday night, only Amazon aired a spot for Alexa, which humorously swapped the voice of its digital assistant for several celebrity substitutes. The ad was very well-received, landing on virtually every publisher’s “best-of” list of the Super Bowl ads this year, in addition to winning the USA Today’s Ad Meter ranking and topping YouTube’s list of the most-viewed Super Bowl ads.
Despite its iconic 1984 Super Bowl commercial introducing the Macintosh computer, Apple usually does not participate in the Super Bowl ad game — the last Super Bowl ad it ran, excluding the ones for Beats, was in 1999 — so it is hardly a surprise that Apple did not air one for HomePod or Siri this year.
Google’s absence following last year’s spot for Google Home, on the other hand, feels a lot more conspicuous, especially considering the aggressive marketing push for Google Assistant at this year’s CES a month ago. Maybe this is due to simple budgetary reasons, or perhaps a strategic decision to prioritize winning over the tech-savvy crowd at CES first before appealing to mass market again with a second Super Bowl ad buy. Either way, Google clearly made a choice to let Alexa take this Super Bowl, and it will be interesting to see how the three big platform owners continue to position and market their smart home products.
Google’s absence following feels a lot more conspicuous, especially considering the aggressive marketing push for Google Assistant at this year’s CES
Brand Trust
As we noted in our Outlook, we’re entering an algorithm-powered reality where every aspect of our lives that can be quantified — from fitness to sleeping, from shopping to dating — is being gradually productized as a data-driven, hyper-personalized solution ready for purchase. As the market extends to every part of our homes and bodies, only the most trusted brands will be granted access to our most private spaces. That trust will include confidence in the product or service itself, but also an alignment with the ethics and politics of the brand behind it.
Last year’s Super Bowl ads leaned heavily on political messages. But with the increasingly divisive political climate in the U.S., brands seem to be split on whether to go that route again this year. A recent survey found that 63% of Americans think the Super Bowl is ill-suited for political messages, so it makes sense that none of the ads this year explicitly took on a hot-button topic such as immigration like some brands did last year. While some brands chose to play it safe and stayed away from political messages, others such as Coca-Cola, T-Mobile, and Toyota continued to champion equality and inclusion in their spots. Then there were brands like Hyundai, Budweiser, and Stella Artois that turned the spotlight to their respective philanthropic initiatives in their ads to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility so as to earn consumer trust.
Brands like Hyundai, Budweiser, and Stella Artois turned the spotlight to their respective philanthropic initiatives to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility.
Ultimately, brand trust is a calculation of risks and rewards in customer relationship management, highly contingent on the larger contexts and the PR narrative. Dodge took a risk for its Super Bowl spot for Ram Trucks this year using a Martin Luther King Jr. sermon as voiceover was poorly received, with many criticising the brand for commercializing the words of a black civil rights icon and being tone-deaf considering the “take a knee” anti-racism movement that came out of the NFL. Considering MLK also specifically criticized consumerism and capitalism in that very sermon, this choice seems particularly unfit. While the creatives behind the ad may have good intentions, the execution totally missed the mark and cost Ram some goodwill and brand trust.
Another implication of the rising importance of brand trust is attributed to the fact that more and more online discovery becomes driven by AI-powered recommendations, and whether consumers trust the algorithms behind them to deliver results that are in consumers’ best interest. In this regard, the usual suspects of personal finance services, such as Quicken Loans and Turbo Tax, returned once again to Super Bowl to tout the trustworthiness and user-friendliness of their sophisticated software-driven solutions. E*Trade’s ad spot humorously featured several senior citizens doing physically demanding jobs to implore viewers to trust their service to save for retirement.
In contrast, the well-received Sprint ad, which features a robotic scientist getting relentlessly mocked by the AI-powered robots for overpaying Verizon, offers a light-hearted take on our general anxiety over the implications that recent advances in artificial intelligence set to bring in the near future. While the idea that future AIs will always know better than us is not exactly a comforting thought, it does points to a golden opportunity for brands to leverage AI-powered solutions to deliver the most relevant and timely messages to consumers.
All in all, this year’s Super Bowl ads offered a good reflection on some of the overarching trends in market today, and the Lab will continue to track their development in media and technology over the course of the year. In the meantime, you can follow us here on Medium or on major social media @ipglab for our latest updates. Click here to read the full 2018 Outlook.
