In this year’s Super Bowl ads, brands are mostly playing it safe
In this year’s Super Bowl ads, brands are mostly playing it safe
Super Bowl LVIII is this Sunday in Las Vegas. The Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers are facing off in what could be the most watched championship game ever. Forecasters are expecting more than 100 million people are going to tune in to this year’s Super Bowl. That means a lot of eyeballs on not just the football game, but also the ads in between the action on the field.
Jeanine Poggi, editor at Ad Age, has been looking through all of this year’s Super Bowl ads and has a preview. She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio, and the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: Now you’ve seen more of the ads than I have. I’ve poked through a bunch. I didn’t see anything that just like … was so sidesplitting I couldn’t breathe. Did you see anything funny?
Jeanine Poggi: You know it’s the problem with humor, right? A lot of it sort of blends together. It takes a lot to stand out when you try to do humor, and a lot of the Super Bowl ads are, I thought the BMW ad with Christopher Walken, which you have a whole bunch of people trying to imitate him, a little cameo from Usher in it — I thought that was funny.
Brancaccio: Jeanine that is the one that I did think was funny. It was about — accept no substitutes, there’s only one authentic BMW and one authentic Christopher Walken. And what else do you like?
Poggi: I like the E-Trade one. The E-Trade babies, always a fan favorite, right? But the E-Trade babies are playing pickleball. And it was just cute, right? Not laugh out loud, but enjoyable and cute nonetheless.
Brancaccio: Now, once upon a time in this world, Jeanine, there was an industry called cryptocurrency. And they used to, back in the day, advertise a lot during the Super Bowl. You seeing much crypto?
Poggi: No, not surprising here, given what happened with the crypto market. We did see a crypto bubble of sorts, where a bunch of crypto brands advertised, sort of like the dot-com bubble. If you remember, all of the brands, the Pets.com of the world, that advertised in the Super Bowl, and then the next year went out of business. Similarly, we’re just not seeing that in the Super Bowl this year. There are some emerging tech conversations going on, especially around AI. Not necessarily AI companies advertising in the Super Bowl, but how AI is being applied.
Brancaccio: We are speaking in a world that’s after the Bud Light situation, which got a tidal wave of backlash for collaborating with transgender actress and social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, to the point where Bud Light is no longer the top-selling beer in America. Given that, are we going to see a lot of issues-oriented ads with political messages this time around?
Poggi: I would say the last couple of years, you really saw brands playing it safe. Very few, if any, have been wading into anything that could even be perceived as controversial. And it’s really not a place — especially when you’re spending $7 million — that you really want to divide the country.
Brancaccio: Now we do keep an eye on the research that Ad Age does, that your team does, regarding diversity — not just of the ad images themselves, but also the people behind the camera and the production staff. Are you still tracking that?
Poggi: We are. We’re knee-deep in all of that research right now, as you can imagine. It is something that is incredibly difficult to do. It’s been very hard to track down real stats of, behind the scenes, especially, which is really what we care about, on top of the casting, of who is actually working on these commercials behind the scenes. Right now, it appears as though the trendline remains the same from last year. I think it’s pretty steady. We’re not seeing any major uptick.
One thing I’m really surprised about that hasn’t changed, and we’ll have more on this, is accessibility in Super Bowl commercials. Talking about the disabled community. It’s one area where you talk about inclusivity. And even accessibility as it comes to closed captioning in Super Bowl ads is not something many brands are really thinking about right now. And that’s one thing, so far, that’s standing out to me. I thought that would change year to year and it doesn’t appear that it has.
Brancaccio: Yeah, but there’s one ad that does address — was it disability?
Poggi: Yes, so the Google ad. It was actually shot by a blind director Adam Morris. And it shows and it puts viewers into the shoes of what it would be like to be a visually impaired person.
Poggi: And the whole thing is shot — he put petroleum jelly on the camera to give the effect of being visually impaired. And it actually promotes Google’s feature on its Pixel phone that helps people with visual impairment take photos. I think that one will stand out, especially when you look at all of the sea of humor. It’s definitely a positive message and one of belonging.
Brancaccio: And it is the 2024 Super Bowl. I’m supposed to say these syllables: Taylor Swift. Travis Kelce. Are brands jumping aboard that at all?
Poggi: I don’t see how we could not talk about that. Look, are you necessarily going to see Taylor Swift in a commercial? No, not necessarily. But there is no way — we know that all of these agencies that create the Super Bowl commercials for brands, they’re in their war rooms gearing up with the mean factories of any way brands could lean into any Taylor Swift moment.
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