Super Bowl is the biggest showdown of epic commercials.
On Tuesday, 10th February, Marketing Finland organized a panel where Finland’s finest marketing minds discussed the best ads of the year. Our CEO, Riku Vassinen, was part of the panel and here are his top five Super Bowl ads this year.
Budweiser “American Icons”
If there is a golden standard of Super Bowl ad, this is it. Animals always get higher rating, but of course Budweiser has had Clydesdales for a long while. Now they introduce a baby eagle (from their parent company logo) and music from maybe the most “American”band in the world, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Guardian had good analysis of the ad; it is sort of borderline parody, but the over-to-the-top quality and finesse can make it something that could unite nation. Hey, everyone can unite over beers and cute animals.
Claude “How I can Communicate Better With My Mom”
Whilst this is not your usual big game celebrity filled craziness (more on those later), it is a great challenger ad (or ad series, to be exact). Anthropic hits OpenAI where it hurts: they need to run ads. Good theme song (Dr. Dre: What´s The Difference”), great acting and writing. These already seem to be working as Sam Altman got quite testy about them:
“I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.”
Especially in comparison to nicely done, but quite hollow “Codex" by ChatGPT, Claude won this round. Oh yeah, Gemini was in Super Bowl as well, had already forgotten the ad. Pepsi ad was a piece of great challenger marketing as well.
Instacart “Bananas”
This was a coin toss between this, Hellmanns “Meal Diamond” or State Farm“Livin´on a Prayer”. Lots of celebrities, catchy song and just general craziness. However this Spike Jonze-directed Ben Stiller-starred mayhem just made me laugh out loud, plus it is not relying on existing song. Instacart just tried a little bit harder. The extended version is even better.
There were also toilets singing Phil Collins, why wouldn´t there be?
Levi´s “Backstory”
This ad has a lot of butts and James Brown soundtrack (“Get Up Offa that Thing”), so what´s not to like? It is also refreshing that in celebrity studded ads this also features them, but only their backs: Doechii, Questlove, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Rosé, Stefanie Giesinger plus couple of iconic backshots (Woody from Toy Story, “Bornin The USA”). Levi´s back in Super Bowl after 20 years and with a kickstart fora great campaign.
Honorable mention
Doordash “Beef 101”
Apparently this did not even run on game day, but still worth mentioning. I always like when ad works on one level and there are more layers to it. This gives the obvious jabs to Puff Daddy and also couple of more intrigued blows to Ja Rule & Floyd Mayweather. And Doordash bag and products visible the whole ad.
The duds
When it comes to duds, couple of really bad use of AI ads (Toyota, Svedka to name a few), but maybe a little bit less I was expecting. I had higher hopes for both of the ads directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (Squarespace,Grubhub), but felt that he was just mailing it in for the big game.
Lots of Backstreet Boys this year as well, which can be good or bad thing I guess. Crypto.com “Backstreet´s back” karaoke ad is quite on brand though. Buying the most expensive advertising real estate with very minimum branding sort of summarizes the whole cryptobusiness.
