Brian Kenny: “This flat tire needs a man," says the narrator of the Goodyear Tire commercial that aired during the inaugural Super Bowl between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs in 1967. The ad featured a damsel in distress with a blown tire on a dark and lonely stretch of road. He goes on to say, "When there's no man around, Goodyear should be."
It probably shouldn't be surprising that advertisers took a chauvinistic tone for spots appearing on a game that was expected to be watched mostly by men. With brands like Ford, Chrysler, Muriel Cigars, and Budweiser, it was an advertising bro fest, but also a reflection of the cultural norms of the time. After all, the 1960s was the dawn of the golden age of advertising when agencies were evolving from product pitchers to storytellers. That first Super Bowl was broadcast on not one, but two major networks, capturing an audience of 56 million viewers. A 60 second spot cost $85,000. Advertisers were hooked from the start.
Fast forward to 2019 and the Super Bowl is still one of the most watched events at major network television, but now, women make up almost half of the 100 million viewers. Thankfully, the chauvinism has been dialed back, a clear indicator that brand storytelling has evolved with the times. At a cost of over $5 million for a 30 second spot, competition between the advertisers is every bit as intense as the play on the field. Today, we'll hear from Assistant Professor Shelle Santana about her case entitled, Super Bowl Storytelling. (Not yet available for public download.)
I'm your host, Brian Kenny, and you're listening to Cold Call, recorded live at the 2019 Evanta CMO Executive Summit.
Shelle Santana is an expert in consumer behavior, particularly in relation to spending and credit. Before embarking on her academic career, she was a marketing executive at American Express. Shelly, thanks for joining me today.
Santana: Thanks for having me.
Kenny You're listening in on the 100th episode of Cold Call, so we're excited to be here today to share this with you. We're going to engage the audience in the conversation as we move along, but Shelly, can you just tell me, what prompted you to write this case?
Santana: I was teaching a course on branding this year, and we were going to do a module on brand storytelling. I thought the Super Bowl is such a unique opportunity to explore, and examine, and observe the range of storytelling devices and the range of storytelling features that brands use in this one moment and in this one platform. The second reason is that it's such a significant cultural, economic, social, commercial enterprise, the Super Bowl, that I wanted to take advantage of it being the day before one of our main classes, and so we can sort of carry the social significance from Sunday into our classroom on Monday and just talk about the ads as consumers, but also turning the tables and examining them as brand managers, and so examining, what is the effectiveness of these ads? What was the story that the brand was trying to tell? When you look at the ads across the entire programming, and there's 85 to 90 ads that are aired during the Super Bowl, which people actually watch, you begin to see the themes coalesce around a few different ideas. Those ideas tend to reflect what's animating and motivating culture at any particular point in time, and that's kind of an “aha” moment for the students to see.Kenny: Are they a little tired the day after the Super Bowl, the students?
Santana: They're very tired the day after the Super Bowl. Many, many people, about 16 million people actually call in sick to work the day after the Super Bowl, and there are some HR executives that are lobbying to actually have the day after the Super Bowl be a holiday.
Kenny: Yes, I'm in favor of that.
Kenny: How many minutes of advertising in a one-hour program?
Santana: Typically, a one-hour television program has about 13 minutes of advertising on it. The Super Bowl, in contrast, which is almost a four-hour spectacle, has 46 minutes of advertising on it. So, a typical one-hour program has about 17 ads. The Super Bowl has between 85 and 90 ads, and people actually watch the ads, which is what's even more exciting. For the other 364 days a year, consumers go out of their way to avoid commercials.
Kenny: The case gets into some data about how much brands are spending on advertising, generally speaking. I mean, what does that number look like?
Santana: In general, brands tend to spend about $224 billion in advertising across all different platforms, and television is about 35 percent of that, so about $78 billion. The Super Bowl, in and of itself, is a $420 million expenditure on just that one day, and that's just for the ad time. That's not the ad production.
“The Super Bowl is such a unique opportunity to explore, and examine, and observe the range of storytelling devices and storytelling features that brands use in this one moment and in this one platform.”
Kenny: How has streaming affected the advertising industry? We've heard over and over again that advertising that we know today is going to die, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Santana: It's not, but it is definitely changing. Streaming is one of the things that has fundamentally affected advertising and how brands speak to consumers. When we were living in a strictly analog world, we all had to endure commercials. Now, with streaming, you can bypass ads altogether, not even be exposed to them. Brands have had to get much more clever on how they're going to reach consumers. What you see a lot of times now is these, almost like micro ads, these 5- and 10-second promotional spots just to get some awareness out there for these entirely digital consumers that are out there, like my sons who have no use for anything larger than a cell phone in front of them.
Kenny: Why don't we dive into the Super Bowl, itself? There are some great statistics in the case about food consumption and things like that on Super Bowl Sunday.
Santana: Americans consume more food on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year, other than Thanksgiving. We consume, literally, millions of pounds of potato chips and avocados. Billions of chicken wings, tens of millions of cases of beer are sold on Super Bowl Sunday, and not surprisingly then, the day after the Super Bowl, the sales of antacids are higher by about 20 percent. Sixteen million people call in sick to work. The week leading up to the game there's a Super Bowl lift in categories like condiments, dips, processed cheese. You see the Super Bowl effects sort of trickling through the entire economy. So, it's not just a day about football. It's a day about consumption.
Kenny: Awesome. When did the ads start to become kind of their own phenomenon? At some point, we must've turned a corner where the ads became part of the story.
Santana: A lot of people point to Apple's 1984 ad, which aired, not surprisingly, on the 1984 Super Bowl when they announced the launch of the Macintosh personal computer. That is still in the advertising Hall of Fame. It was directed by Ridley Scott, who is a well-known film producer and director. It was the first time that this really compelling story was told in anticipation of a product launch, and that became sort of the benchmark going forward for must-see TV and what brand storytelling could look like on this phenomenal platform when you've got one out of every three Americans in the country engaged and watching.
Kenny: Yes, and they're paying close attention. I mean, people are like getting back to the TV to see the ad and then leaving during the game, sometimes. So, does that mean the stakes are a lot higher for brands featuring an ad in the Super Bowl?
Santana: I would say the stakes are higher because it costs so much money; $5 million for a 30-second spot is a lot of money. So, there's a lot of scrutiny around, what are you getting for that $5 million? What brands are doing a lot of times now … about half of the ads are released in advance, and so we did a mini ad meter in the class, which is what USA Today runs every year. For about half of the ads that had been pre-released, I asked half my students to evaluate, How much do you like this ad? so they got to watch them as consumers. The other half of my students were asked, How many more sales is this ad going to generate?
Then we looked at those results in class, in real time, and the list of ads are almost never the same. They don't match up, and that's a big “a-ha” moment for students to think about, what is the purpose of this ad? So going back to your question of are the stakes higher, I think what the cost of the Super Bowl does is force brand managers to think about what they want to get out of this. And how do I measure the success of it? Do I want brand awareness? Do I want to drive sales? Do I want to drive conversation on social media? Those are all worthy goals, but they're very different metrics, and you need to be very clear on what you're actually trying to accomplish.
Kenny: What do you think about the strategy of leaking them out? I could imagine that you want to build up suspense, you want to have that “a-ha” moment when the ad comes on [for the first time]. In the last couple of years, with everybody putting their ads out beforehand, it felt to me sort of anticlimactic.
Santana: There are some ads that don't get released beforehand, and those tend to be the ones that are around halftime, like big moments, the last ad before halftime, the first ad when halftime is over, and fourth quarter ads. But the clever thing I think about releasing ads in advance is you begin to engage consumers earlier, and then when you wrap that around a social media strategy you can begin to drive conversation about your brand before, during, and after the airing of the Super Bowl. That's another way that you can sort of extend and expand your ROI on the investment.
Kenny: Which, obviously, continues to drive the cost up. So, now we're not just talking about advertising. We're talking about the incremental expense of building a social media campaign around this. I've got to engage my customers through word of mouth. What does that look like to a CMO as they're sorting through those decisions?
“It definitely can drive your costs up, but the amplification opportunity on social media is significant.”
Santana: It definitely can drive your costs up, but the amplification opportunity on social media is significant. If you just think about 100 million people watching the Super Bowl, if you can get another 100 million people posting on Facebook, that's really powerful and very compelling. So, the reach that social media platforms have, in addition to the network television programming and the airing of the Super Bowl, itself, is a real winner. That's a great combination.
Kenny: What about trolls on the internet? They're the people who kind of lurk around and are looking for any opportunity to say something negative.
Santana: Brands risk backlash all the time. It's not unique to the Super Bowl. Once you enter the social space, you relinquish a lot of power around what is said about your brand for better or for worse. I think today's CMOs and brand managers are very savvy about that, and it's not just brands… and so, it drives conversation, right? And so on some level, there is still something to be said for how much attention your brand gets. I wouldn't go so far as to say that any ink is good ink, but you can extend your brand exposure the more you're part of the conversation.
Kenny: Who has been the most consistent advertiser on the Super Bowl?
Santana: : Budweiser has advertised on, I believe, all Super Bowls. It's 132 ads they've run, and to the tune of $440 million. And they've had some of the most iconic ads on the Super Bowl, as well.
Kenny: Your case cites one in particular… Which ad was that?
Santana: That was puppy love. Consumers really loved that ad, and it's just a really sweet story. It's very enduring about this puppy who is on a farm, and the puppy manages to dig under the fence every day and run over to the barn where the majestic Clydesdales are. He hangs out in the barn with the Clydesdales all day. He's eventually adopted by someone, and as their car drives away the puppy is looking out the window at the Clydesdales in the field, and they notice… They block the road, and the next scene is the puppy running back with the Clydesdales. The brand logo isn't even shown until the very last screen before the screen goes to black, and the hashtag is #BestBuds from Budweiser. So, yeah. A lot of people still say that's the best ad ever.
Kenny: That gets to my next question, which is, can you effectively tell a story, a brand story, in 30 or 60 seconds?
Santana: There are four elements to a great story. You need to have a character. You need to have a plot. You've got to have some conflict or challenge that they overcome, and you have to have a moral of the story, like what's the message we're trying to convey? That's actually surprisingly easy to do in 30 or 60 seconds. Some people, obviously, are better at it than others, but with those four pillars, you can absolutely tell a great story in a short amount of time.
Kenny: When you augment it with social media, you can probably delve deeper into that story. What brands that have done well on the social media side of it?
Santana: Budweiser aired a live stream of Clydesdales in their barn having a Super Bowl watch party. It was literally just a live feed of the Clydesdales in a barn, just a camera that was held on horses for a few minutes, but the level of engagement of people actually watching the Clydesdales [was high]. Then when it was mentioned on air, engagement would spike up again. These brands do a great job.
Another great story that I love is Skittles in this year's Super Bowl. They didn't run an ad on this Super Bowl, but instead did a Broadway show. What they realized was that, why are we advertising on the Super Bowl when no one is running out for a Skittles run during the middle of the game? So, they took their money and invested it in this Broadway show that would air before the game. The premise that was that Michael C. Hall is this famous actor who has been approached to do a commercial for the Super Bowl, and he is agonizing over this decision because it's going to kill his career. The signature song in the show is “Advertising Ruins Everything”, the tongue and cheek nature of it. This was all on social media, and then coupled with the actual live performance was one of the most interesting and creative strokes of genius around Super Bowl non-advertising.
Kenny: There's been several brands that have gotten the attention for not being on the Super Bowl in the past. That's a different strategy.
Santana: Pepsi famously did it one year where they took all of their money out of what they would advertise on the Super Bowl and poured it into a different promotional social campaign. This year, interestingly, Coca-Cola didn't advertise, and the Super Bowl was held in Atlanta on their home turf. That created a lot of attention, as well. It was interesting because it allowed Pepsi, who did do an ad on the Super Bowl, to sort of blanket the entire arena with Pepsi advertising and the Pepsi logo, which you would never see in Atlanta any other time. So, that was a very interesting move.
Kenny: But does that signal something bigger? Is there kind of a trend moving in the opposite direction? We're in this period of time where we've got a millennial generation that cares a lot about social responsibility, and they want their companies to be doing the right thing. They want to feel good about where they work. I could see where other big brands start to move in this direction, which seems to be anti-NFL.
Santana: I don't see it as either/or. I see it as a both and. What you see a lot of is firms, instead of their typical advertising of products, might be advertising some of the pro-environmental, pro-social, or CSR efforts that they have as a company. Verizon, for example, on this year's Super Bowl, their spot was all about first responders… That's a very different type of ad than what you might typically see.
Kenny: How have you seen things evolve, particularly in the last 10 or 15 years?
Santana: Brands have taken a much more political stance, really trying to strike a right balance. Going back to taking a stand on issues important to millennials, but millennials aren't the only consumers out there. Brands serve an entire continuum, and so trying to strike the right balance. Lots of the commercials have been really tough. The Super Bowl reflects what society and culture is talking about at the time, or what we're anxious about, or what's animating us. A few years ago, there were a lot of ads on the Super Bowl that had a political undertone to them, whether it was about immigration, whether it was about inclusiveness. Some consumers loved that but some consumers absolutely hated that and they thought the Super Bowl is my time to escape … this isn't the time where I want to engage in a political conversation. And so this year, a lot of the politics was dialed back in the ads. Again, some people loved it. Some people said that made the ads really boring.
Kenny: Watching the Super Bowl with you must be fun because you're probably watching these ads in a very different way than the rest of us.
Santana: Yes. I'm sitting there analyzing them. My poor sons, they're two teenage boys, and I'm like, "So, what do you think the brand storytelling advice was in that?" That's a great way to clear the room of teenage boys.
Kenny: : Go get some Skittles. I want to engage our audience in the conversation a little bit now. We've got time for a few questions.
Speaker 1: Great talk. Do you have any data to indicate that that brand storytelling actually converts into consumer behavior or consumption? So, there are these fantastic stories on the Super Bowl, but I think a lot of us look at that and say, "Hmm, I wonder if that actually does drive sales."
Santana: This is a great question, and it's one of the things that I talk about with my students. At the brand level, one of the things I say is, if you're going to be doing any sort of promotion … what do we really want to get out of this? Do we want to get brand awareness, brand engagement? We want people tweeting. But then the question is, how does that translate into sales down the road? There is a correlation there between brand awareness and brand engagement, and brand activity and sales, but it isn’t a [direct] one, to be frank, and it's often a long tail effect. So, a lot of times, you have to just be patient. What I ask my students is, "Let's think about the opposite, which is, if we don't do this at all, would we have the exact same sales?" I think there's stronger evidence of when brands don't invest in advertising and messaging and storytelling on a consistent basis, you see almost an immediate decline in sales. When they do invest, it tends to either remain stable or go up, but it may not do that in the immediate short-term, right? It's a patient long-term play, unless, in that ad, there's a very specific call to action like if you call within the next 30 minutes, then you'll get X, right? That doesn't typically tend to happen on Super Bowl.
“… when brands don't invest in advertising and messaging and storytelling on a consistent basis, you see almost an immediate decline in sales.”
Kenny: Other questions?
Speaker 2: You mentioned a little bit about people staying away from political ads this past year. I'd be curious to hear more on the negative effects a bad Super Bowl ad can have on a brand…
Santana: Having a really big backlash on Super Bowl can have a negative effect on a brand, but it's a calculation that, I think, the best brands make and they make wisely. Another case I have is on Nike and (former NFL quarterback) Colin Kaepernick, and the decision to use Kaepernick as the face of the 30th anniversary of the Just Do It campaign. There was a lot of hand-wringing over that. It wasn't obvious that this was a good decision, but the calculation came down to... that there are going to be a segment of our consumers who will abandon us, and there will be a segment of consumers who stay, who are more committed, who buy more and will bring more people into the fold because of this. The calculation and the math, frankly, is, which one is bigger? That's how you sort of assess the risk.
Kenny: Another question down front here.
Speaker 3: Would you hazard a guess at what you think the storytelling tone will be January of 2020?
Santana: It's very hard to tell because culture shifts very quickly, but I think what you can see from this year's past ads is that there were a couple of very clear themes that bubbled up. One was this rise of the machine, and fear of AI and technology, like our lives are being controlled by these smart devices. There was another theme around women's empowerment, right? I think the women's empowerment theme will quite possibly resonate into the next Super Bowl.
Kenny: We have time for one more question, folks.
Speaker 4: You mentioned that there are a lot of polls regarding rating of the ads. What happens when your ad flops? How big of an impact is that on your brand value, your brand reputation?
Santana: It depends on the size of the brand. There are two things I want to say about this. The first is that I have my students rate the ads, and then I compare that to what the national sample is on USA Today, and it's not the same at all. The first takeaway for them is, you are not representative. This is very important for you to understand, you are not representative. In terms of ads that flop, I think it depends on why they flop. I'll give you an example. My students really loved the Bumble ad with Serena Williams. That ad did not do well on a national level, in terms of resonating with consumers. I haven't heard that it's actually hurt Bumble at all. It may be a case of maybe this particular audience was too broad for the message that we were trying to convey at this point in time. But when you're Budweiser and you've run 132 ads, not all of those ads are great, but they've been able to sort of sustain themselves. So, some of it has to do with the size of the brand.
[The impact can be different] when it's a very small brand. On the 2014 Super Bowl, there was a 15-person company, Goldie Blocks, that won a contest and they advertised on the Super Bowl. They haven't advertised on the Super Bowl since, but that was a huge boost to them, just getting awareness out there. So, it goes both ways, for sure.
Kenny: Shelly, thank you so much for joining us today.
Santana: Thanks for having me.
Kenny: I want to thank this great audience of marketers here at the conference. You've been listening to the 100th episode of Cold Call, so you guys are helping us celebrate a milestone, as well. We're an official podcast of Harvard Business School brought to you by the HBR Presents network.