The Heroine Of Super Bowl LIX Was Actually Not Taylor Swift
Superbowl Sunday is not just a big day for football fans.
For creatives and marketing nerds alike, it’s a stage for some of the brightest and boldest ideas in advertising. You might say it feels like the…Super Bowl of Branding. Ba dum tss.
As firm believers in finding & sharing your voice, our love for branding stems from its ability to serve as that vessel. Through branding and marketing, businesses can share important messages, beyond the business per se.
Take Dove, or Toms for example. Dove, a company dealing in personal care, pivoted from copy covering deep exfoliation and acne and instead began focusing on self esteem. While acne and self esteem are both valid nodes within “personal care”, one angle feels a little more inherently good for the customers. It’s a win win.
Toms gained attention initially by donating a pair of shoes for every pair your purchase. On their website, the subtle choice to add “impact” into their main menu further anchors their identity in philanthropy.
Given how American’s have been feeling for a few years, advertising slots for Super Bowl LIX hold slightly more weight, given brands a truly unique opportunity to make a statement, and hopefully a connection.
The products and services advertised were scattered, from AI and healthcare to Super Bowl adjacent products like beer, chips, sports drinks, delivery apps, etc. But if you were able to stay tuned through Mountain Dew’s disturbing Seal portrayal, you might have caught a few particularly noteworthy placements.
Below, we look at a few of our favorite “creative & positive” placements, and zoom in on an important but controversial (perhaps by design) approach by Novartis, and of course, we share the #1 favorite.
Disney rides the wave of the viral “X sneaks onto the field!!!” content.
Starting with one of the first spots, the genius was in the simplicity. Immediately showing a wide shot of the field, the audio commentary hits us with “Sorry folks, there’s a breaking development…there’s something down on the field…”
For a few seconds, it sounds like honest commentary from one of many viral “dog-snuck-onto-the-field” reels. Only after tuning in more intently do you realize it’s a commercial for Lilo & Stitch.
On the surface, it might just seem like a cute, dog friendly commercial, but to us, it’s a masterclass in marketing. For a product like this, there is little to do other than gain exposure.
The product in Lilo & Stitch is entertainment, and if this ad caught your attention it did so because you were drawn to its entertainment factor.
With a focused goal of maximizing exposure, in a way that aligns with the product itself, someone had the brilliant idea to not just be top of mind to people watching the TV, but to use those 30 seconds to create an attention vortex. This audio had enough gravity to pull someone in from the chip & dip to the big screen, and even interrupt conversation altogether.
Takeaway: If you can identify the goal of a certain marketing agenda - from building a brand to a single social media post- you can focus the creative energy into a presentation that hyper-focuses on that.
In this case, rather than struggle to hold attention, this ad flipped the script and actually pulled attention from people just based on proximity to the TV.
Bonus: People and pets will continue making their way onto fields, only now, Lilo & Stitch get a free subconscious “impression” each time they do. “Hey did you see that Lilo & Stitch ad
The second brand stood out for other reasons. Not because we love Matthew McConaughey (though Intersteller was genius and deserves its own blog post) but because the brand demonstrates a clear commitment to listening to the public.
In the tricky AI territory, navigating all sorts of political correctness, Salesforce faces the dialogue head on. They push society to embrace the machine, and in taking their stance, position themselves as leaders of the conversation, and the evolution itself.
The ad piggybacks off relatable airport stress. Getting to your gate to find its been moved, and managing the “itinerary” of your life. Salesforce shares Agentforce as the solution.
Comparing their prior message “Ask More of AI” the new tagline seems to have been refined to a message nobody can argue with. After all, who wouldn’t want to reduce the stress of traveling.
In the debate of ethics and AI, this brand now feels like your ally, because regardless of the details in your personal feelings on AI, the thesis is the same as theirs. This is what ‘AI Was Meant to Be.’
The Lilo & Stitch spot had me confused for a moment, but Novartis, though we applaud the message, still seems a little confusing, a day later.
The ad opened with a wide shot of a cheerleading team, perhaps practicing. By 2 seconds, the camera is BAM, zoomed (above), while rhythmic lyrics chant “I see you lookin - lookin at me!” Worth noting, the song is extremely reminiscent of Groove Armada’s “I see you baby, shakin that ass” - for context on mood.
By 7 seconds, the shot was cutting from one model to the next, 4 times, cropped only at the chest. It felt like the visual equivalent of a loudspeaker going SEX SEX SEX!
When the reveal came, the visuals made sense, but sadly, it didn’t all just “click”. The ad felt like a disappointed mother saying “get your head out of the gutter and start being a positive member of society”. But we are all human, and asking us to not think of breasts unless we are thinking about preemptive breast cancer screening is a tall order, for all genders.
Online, women are voicing concerns over the approach, with one recently diagnosed sharing she was “horrified to see an ad that hyper-sexualized breast cancer in the name of awareness”…later asking “Am I the only one pissed??”
While awareness might have been the goal, unlike Lilo & Stitch, simply gaining attention at all costs was not a specific enough goal for success. Novartis might have done better by refining their goal with more parameters:
Generate Awareness.
Guide Action with simple, accessible steps.
They could have shared basic info - like screening only takes 20 minutes. Or how to find a screening location near you. Answering some of the FAQs upfront could help minimize the barrier people feel to take that first step.
Overall, we like the tagline “So Much Attention. Yet So Ignored,” while Wanda Sykes’ line, “Let’s start paying attention to breasts when it matters most,” are good ideas, but don’t feel realistic, and almost create feeling of guilt for simply watching the ad. In broad strokes, you want our support, but you just made me feel like a degenerate.
The problem isn’t that people don’t care about breast cancer—it’s overcoming the inertia of daily life. We would love to see an ad focused on bridging the gap to encourage action. Even if we are biased towards “good” messages.
While Novartis’s execution might not have been our favorite, it did fit into our favorite theme of the super ads - the theme of Female Empowerment - completely independent of Taylor Swift!
If you take away the finer details of the ads themselves and just consider the messages and placement, Nike, Hellmans, Dove, and Novartis all did something important this year.
Choosing messages for female empowerment during the Super Bowl, the prototypical alpha male pastime, is in and of itself, an empowering move. To the marketers, advertisers, and branding nerds, it’s moves like that which illustrate a deeper understanding of branding as an artform.
It’s these layers coming together that make it so enjoyable for us as creators. And it’s why we love Interstellar enough to mention it’s parallels to branding not once, but twice in this article. Seriously, a movie about a world short on resources, where they grow 500 acres of corn to be sold and reinvested back into the film. Wild.
As for the brands supporting Female Empowerment during Super Bowl LIX, our favorite was Nike.
After nearly 30 years away from super bowl advertising, Nike is off to the races with a very clear, and strong female empowerment message.
Starting off with impressive cinematography leading into a powerful shot of Sha’Carri Richardson (openly bi-sexual), the ad builds its foundation on motivational female athletes -including Caitlin Clark and A'Ja Wilson.
As the camera cuts from athlete to athlete, each doing their own thing, the audio commentary recites a series of different statements following the cadence of “You can’t X… so X”.
After a few initial “you can’ts”, it evolves.
“You can’t put yourself first, so put yourself first… You can’t be confident. So be confident.” You can’t fill a stadium, so fill that stadium!”
As it continued, there was a point where the dialogue started to get slightly repetitive.
Whether it was by design or not, we felt there was a connection there. Women hear messages like this ad nauseam, over and over. And over and over. And again. Like that.
It is a beautifully crafted ad because it inflicts the exact pain point they are calling out, and we love how the message permeates from the ad itself into layers.
Nike pretty much reminded all the women watching that they can forget Taylor Swift, they are the hero.
So for that, we applaud Nike as the top Ad of the Super Bowl. Well done.
Hellmans leans into female empowerment in a slightly different way, normalizing sexual openness and satisfaction for woman. While we didn’t love the sexualization for breast cancer screening, we don’t find mayo to be that serious of a topic, so we’re all for it.
Throughout history, art has always been a way to gauge the culture. While Kendrick’s halftime performance is getting mixed reviews, at its core, we felt it necessary at the very least as a demonstration of freedom of speech, and freedom to challenge ones own nation. Now more than ever, there are communities with important messages that need to be shared and spread.
For the forward thinking, we appreciate the way businesses can work to craft brands for social change, and we support the use of the big stage for women to amplify their voices boldly, confidently, and directly to a Super Bowl audience.
