The cheat code Super Bowl

Without looking online, name a single spot that ran during the game last night that didn’t feature celebrities doing silly celebrity things.

Of course, celebrities play a valuable role when you need to tell a complete story in a mere 30 seconds. Celebrities have embedded meaning. They are prologues that you don’t have to explain. They come with context at first sight.

That said, there was an utterly striking degree of sameness to Super Bowl advertising and its use of celebrity this year. 

Sure, there were minor thematic variations. 

There were the “reunion” spots, where celebrities recreated shows and movies from (generally speaking, many many) years gone by. Pop Corners riffed on Breaking Bad while Rakuten played on Clueless. Michelob Ultra knocked off Caddyshack. Paramount+ brought back Cliffhanger. These four properties alone are a combined 116 years old.

There were the “ensemble” spots, where a mixed-nut bag of celebs embody a metaphor for a product’s value proposition. Jon Hamm and Brie Larson represented a ham and cheese sandwich for Hellman’s. Deon Sanders and his family personified strength for Oikos Yogurt. Kevin Bacon rhapsodized about six packs and six degrees of separation for Budweiser. And a panoply of faded rock stars – from Ozzy Osbourne to Joan Jett to Billy Idol to Paul Stanley (with an average age of 69) – poked fun at workplace cliches for Workday.

Then there were the musical interludes. Diddy and friends for Uber One. Melissa McCarthy and a very big production number for Booking.com. Meghan Trainor and a “Made You Look” reprise for Pringles. 

Some of these spots are funny. Your mileage will vary. But it’s the same formula. The real question is, how and why did we get here?

It is understandable, to an extent. The cost of a 30-second spot is $7 million dollars, not counting production, fees and talent costs. All together, we’re talking about a $20 million minute – all happening at a time of unprecedented scrutiny around budgets and ROI.

Marketers can’t risk going unnoticed in the big game. A game that people are presumably watching at parties full of distractions. Food and drink and friends and phones to scroll through and social media platforms to fill in the moments between the on-field action.

What’s more, the success criteria for this investment has been reduced to the bluntest of outcomes. That is – The Monday Morning Buzz. 

I’m a working brand strategist. I’ve literally been briefed on Super Bowl assignments with nothing more than the following: Just win, baby. 

That is, just win the USA Today Ad Meter. Don’t worry about the key takeaway. Don’t worry about building the brand. Don’t worry about carving out a meaningful role in people’s lives. Don’t worry about behavioral outcomes. Just win, baby.

This leads to a hacker mindset. I believe that people like me have internalized what type of execution (notice I don’t even say idea, I say execution, because that’s what we’re dealing with here) is most likely to win Monday.

It’s a formula. It’s a cheat code. It’s celebs and cultural references and shouted dialogue. It’s the advertising equivalent of Chaos Muppets.

But it’s not an effective cheat code when everyone has discovered the same hack. 

Our efforts to win the creative sweepstakes inhibit our creativity. We’re all stuck in the same small box, with similar talent, cultural references, beats and even buttons.

This doesn’t mean we are hopeless. The industry has a history of passing through inflection points during the Super Bowl on the way to new things. We had the era of talking animals; the era of mean jokes; the era of big anthems. 

Perhaps we’ve reached the apotheosis of the era of celebrity silliness.

I don’t mean this as a harangue or a criticism or an indictment. We’re all under intense pressure, and the Super Bowl takes it to 11. We could all use a break and a laugh these days, so it is no surprise that we’ve come to embrace the semi-sure-thing.

But think about the wonder of what we get to do for a living. A hundred million people tune in to the Super Bowl every year, ready, waiting, fortified with nachos — and open to anything we have to offer.  

There’s a whole wide world of potential responses to what we choose to say and be on behalf of brands. Hilarity, for sure. But also inspiration, determination, useful outrage, melancholy, longing, love and holy-hell-I-can’t-believe-they-did-that. 

So here’s to putting the 2023 cheat code behind us and letting our collective creativity run amuck. Let’s see what impossible unknown things we can find next year. 

Whoever does will win, baby. Unfettered creativity always does.

Craig Bagno is managing director, global strategic excellence, McCann Worldgroup.