Brands have barely kicked off pumpkin spice season, but marketers are already planning for February’s Super Bowl LIX. And the inside line is: more of the same, only bigger.
The big game is not until Feb. 9, but “as of right now, are people already taking those meetings and sitting there with their whiteboards, figuring out what they’re going to do,” said Dan Lucey, Chief Creative Officer and Co-CEO of Havas NY. The agency created last year’s Super Bowl spot for Danone’s Silk Almond Milk featuring actor Jeremy Renner.
Expect big, splashy, celebrity-driven spots, heavy on comedy and positive sentiments about bringing the country together after a divisive election campaign. Social media influencers and creators are bound to take a higher profile in this year’s efforts, and we may see more pitches featuring women’s sports and artificial intelligence.
“It’s one thing the Super Bowl is good at, is sort of taking the pulse of the Zeitgeist,” said Troy Hitch, Global Chief Creative Officer of agency RAPP.
But also expect that marketers will be leveraging a record ad spend long before kickoff and way after the Feb. 9 broadcast signs off. And they will be surrounding their broadcast TV buys with all sorts of activations and amplification on other channels.
“Savvy brands figure out a way to create something sticky there (but) it’s not as easy as it once was,” said Hitch. “But the Super Bowl is still the one time of year where everybody sits around and watches an event on broadcast TV together.”
NFL Kickoff Offers a Sneak Peek
There is no reason to expect this year’s broadcast on Fox won’t set another record for ad sales, topping last year’s rate of more than $7 million per 30-second spot. Vanessa Chin, SVP Marketing at research company System1, noted Fox announced in August that it was near sell-out of its Super Bowl ad inventory, while a similar announcement from CBS for the 2024 game came later, in November of 2023. TV advertising is having a strong year, not only because of a hot contested election. Chi noted NBCUniversal broke its previous Olympics advertising sales records, bringing in $1.25 billion in revenue for the Paris Olympics.
At these rates—and with the added expense of celebrities, special effects and other production costs—advertisers are not playing. If the ads shown in the opening games of this NFL season are any indication, brands are still going all-in for live sports, to counter the fragmentation of audiences and the loss of younger viewers.
“I feel like I’ve already seen some Super Bowl spots,” said Lucey. Many advertisers broke new campaigns during the league opener. PayPal debuted its largest effort ever, featuring comedian Will Ferrell. State Farm Insurance celebrated new bundles in its new campaign. Hellman’s mayonnaise leveraged its partnership with Tennessee Titans quarterback Will Levis.
“Brands are coming out swinging. They don’t just have one celebrity. They have a celebrity plus an athlete. You see LeBron James and Kevin Hart,” in a DraftKings spot, for example, said Lucey. He singled out Pepsi—a former Super Bowl halftime show sponsor—which broke a splashy campaign during the NFL kickoff featuring rapper Megan Thee Stallion, playing on its sponsorship tie-in with the movie “Gladiator II.”
“These are typically spots that you’d see in the Super Bowl,” he said. “And you’re already seeing them now.”
A number advertisers are getting ahead of their Super Bowl spend, to build anticipation. Many brands have already announced their Super Bowl ads, most notably the shoe company Skechers, which announced its media buy in summer, and Nestle’s Haagen-Dazs ice cream brand, a first-time Super Bowl advertiser. AppleMusic, which replaced Pepsi as the halftime show sponsor in 2022, announced its preliminary plans for the show, which will feature hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar. Apple followed up with a page on its Apple Music site, “Kendrick Lamar’s Road to Halftime,” featuring several playlists for the singer, as well as various NFL players and teams.
Advertisers are increasingly amplifying their Super Bowl ads with teasers, contests and social media engagement leading up to the game, and following the broadcast with more activity. This is not just a function of the expense of making and airing a spot in the broadcast, but also the nature of media consumption today, say insiders.
“You can’t just be in the game and not do everything else,” said Ross Martin, President and Co-Founder of agency Known. “If you’re just making a campaign, and you’re not thinking of it across all channels and all dimensions, then you’re not going to be able to leverage your investment effectively.” The agency has created several Super Bowl ads over the years, including last year’s localized spots that introduced the streaming service Zeam and the launch of the civilian space mission Inspiration 4 during Super Bowl LV.
Brands are increasingly leveraging social media influencers and creators, and the Super Bowl is no exception. “We’re going to start to see an elevation into mainstream awareness of some of these niche creators, streamers or influencers who have massive online audiences, but need a bridge to a more mainstream awareness,” said Hitch.
But the bread and butter of Super Bowl ads will remain celebrities. “The Super Bowl brings out the best of the best from a spokesperson perspective,” said Chin. She noted the season-opener ads showed many football stars, which “makes perfect sense given the familiarity that NFL fans have with these current and retired players.” Lucey suggested some possible pairings could include former NFL quarterbacks Eli and Peyton Manning with their nephew Arch, a star college quarterback, and basketball star LeBron James and his son Bronny.
This summer’s Olympics should also contribute some star power to the Super Bowl, especially the more offbeat characters who broke through during the games, such as the Turkish sharpshooter, breakdancer Rachel “Raygun” Gunn, pommel horse gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik and the unfortunate French pole-vaulter whose groin bulge cost him a medal.
“There’s three or four of them that already have offers that I know of who are making their choices now, because this is their moment to capitalize on that,” said Martin.
More AI, More Women, Less Politics
The Super Bowl remains a mainstay for mass marketers like CPG and auto companies, but it also has been a launch pad for companies and sectors, harkening back to the “Dot-Com Bowl” of 2000. Insiders expect the usual advertisers will see some companies from gaming companies now free to advertise nationally, from a wider swath of alcoholic beverages and from technology companies touting artificial intelligence.
“With AB-InBev no longer having alcohol advertising exclusivity, we saw the booziest turnout in 2023 and can expect this trend to continue with national spots from other major brands, perhaps even touting hard seltzers and low- or no-alcohol alternatives as the category evolves,” said Chin.
And gaming companies have already shown up in the kickoff games this season, so they will likely show up again during the big game. It will be the first Super Bowl in the Super Dome since Caesars Entertainment bought the naming rights in 2021 and the gaming and hospitality company already has an NFL partnership with the Detroit Lions. (Caesars did not respond to a request for comment.)
Technology advertisers always make a show during the game, and this year’s messages are more likely to involve artificial intelligence, which has permeated throughout the ad industry. “I certainly don’t think we can escape AI messaging this year,” said Martin. “We saw crypto made a huge splash a couple of years ago. I think you’ll see AI make that splash,” said Lucey.
Large companies that have made big bets on the technology are likely to turn up in the such as Meta and a number of enterprise technology companies. “I do think we’ll see a big push from Google because they have really taken the high ground,” said RAAP’s Hitch.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if relatively unknown startup companies in the AI space crash the Super Bowl but some might end up in the long list of ‘one-and-done’ entrants,” said Pedr Howard, Head of Creative Excellence at Ipsos. As many insiders noted, the game is a strong platform to launch brands and reposition existing ones.
With New Orleans being the host city, a number of messages will likely lean into the colorful environment and the city’s cultural influences such as jazz music and local cuisine, to form a better connection with viewers, said Graham Page, Global Managing Director, Media Analytics at software company Affectiva.
The advertising content itself is expected to lean into comedy and feel-good messages after a bitter election campaign. Humor is still the best way to create positive emotions that support brand-building, said Chin. Additionally, narratives about women’s sports are expected to surge, especially after the strong showing of female athletes in the Olympics.
Women in general will have a higher profile in this year’s advertising, not just because of the “Taylor Swift effect” seen in last year’s game, featuring her boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce.
“We saw last year the effect Taylor Swift had on the Super Bowl audience she brought, and the brands that were willing to jump into the game because they knew that she was bringing a wider audience,” said Lucey. “It will be interesting to see how brands try to bring that audience again.”
Last year’s ads largely missed the mark in attracting women, a growing demographic for the game, said Howard. He noted most scored weakly in SeeHer’s Gender Equality Measure (GEM) used to gauge gender bias in ads.
“I expect to see brands making a concentrated effort to correct these gender bias issues in this year’s ads,” he said.
In the end, a lot of the Super Bowl ads are going to “revert to the mean,” mainly celebrity-driven comedy, said Martin. But faced with the best mass media opportunity in TV—last year’s game had the biggest TV audience on record, 123.7 million viewers—many will try to innovate.
“What we can get excited about is that some marketers are already planning more creative innovation than we’ve seen in years, because we have so many more tools at our disposal and in recent years, viewers and consumers have rewarded those brands who have taken risks,” he said. “I think you’ll definitely see some more risk-taking with creative. ”
