Super Bowl Ad-dendum

A day later can you remember the brands that advertised?

It’s been 24 hours now since the Super Bowl started, along with its cavalcade of commercials.

Many were clever. Many made us laugh. Some made us think.

But what brands do you remember?

Seriously, name the brands you remember.

Here are mine: Dunkin Donuts, Homes.com, Pringles and Michelob Ultra.

That’s it.

Four brands out of 80 ads, at a cost of $8 million each. Plus the production and agency costs to create them. A lot of money and time wasted.

I did an accidental but worthwhile experiment yesterday. Peeling and cutting potatoes in the kitchen for dinner, I couldn’t look up to see the ads. So I listened to them, trying to figure out the brands they represented.

Nearly all failed this audio test. Forgetting to include mention of their brand in the audio and vocal tracks.

Assuming that people are watching.

For the Super Bowl they probably were. But for the lifetime of those ads, people will not be watching. They’ll be distracted by other screens in front of them: a laptop, a phone, a tablet. Or, they’ll be reading something analog, doing a craft or puzzle, talking to someone, going to the bathroom, getting a snack or a drink. Heads down in something else; heads turned away from the TV.

If you don’t include your brand in your audio, you’ve wasted your company’s money.

A second and equally terrible crime is not including your brand visually in the ad until the ‘big reveal’ at the end.

How very narcissistic of you to think that people will sit around rapt watching your ad until the end to see who it is for.

I’ve made both of these mistakes before as a marketer. Convinced by my shiny NYC agency at the time that the story and beauty of the ad will keep people’s attention.

Nope.

Our post-ad testing showed the worst brand recall we’d had. When we fixed both, including the logo slightly ghosted in the corner of the ad the entire time, and added our brand back into the audio, our recall numbers rebounded.

Dunkin and Homes.com excelled at this in both accounts. Michelob Ultra strong at visual branding (and humor!), with Pringles a close second.

(Though I do wonder if Pringles was irritated they got scooped by Eugene Levy’s flying eyebrows in whatever brand ad he was in earlier. Funny yes, brand recall? No.)

Nike is the one and only exclusion to these rules. But that’s because they have stayed true to their iconic cinematic, black-and-white, athletes-in-motion, production that is unmistakably Nike. You know it’s a Nike ad as soon as it starts. Extra points that they are always able to capture a passion-point-du-jour - this year completely dedicated to women’s sports. Creating an emotional connection with us, especially women and girls. Furthermore, they created stickiness and scale with the immediate and powerful brand extensions on social from the amazing athletes they featured. I was quick to like Sophia Smith’s IG post about it.

So, consider this your free advice for 2025: Don’t forget the reason you are advertising in the first place – For people to make an emotional connection to your brand and remember it.

An emotional connection means nothing in advertising if the brand is not remembered.

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Post-Script to my Ad-dendum:

So…there is one other ad that I remember, but only due to my recency bias as a recovering health care marketer and CMO.

NYU Langone.

Shocked that they spent the money to not only buy the air time, but bought the national airtime. I saw the ad here in Atlanta.

You may not know, but you can buy Super Bowl ad time that will run only in your local market and not nationwide. Still expensive, but not nearly at the $8 million price tag.

If you paid extra close attention you could barely make out the NYU Langone name and logo on the shirts they were wearing. No mention in the audio track - and I cannot even remember if there was any voice over.

Their hope is that people would pay attention to the ad and wait until the end for the big reveal. An end card that didn’t even stay on screen long enough to really digest that it said they were the #1 health system in America, based on one of a myriad of health care quality ranking systems out there.

They committed two big quality errors when it comes to the art of advertising and television commercials. A shame if they really are the top quality health system in the country. They also wasted a lot of their health system’s money at a time when the health care industry is under extreme duress - for a multitude of reasons.

Worse still, the ad featured doctors and administrators throwing around a football. Definitely not a patient in sight and I don’t remember if they even included a nurse.

Nurses typically make up a third of a health care system’s workforce whereas the doctors maybe net in around 15 percent. It’s unclear if this ad was targeted at potential patients, employees or, worse, to drum up popularity votes for the upcoming US News and World Report rankings voting by peers.

I’m curious to see their ad and brand recall results, but I don’t need to. I know exactly what they will be.

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I’m Amy Moudy Comeau, author of Every Storm Runs Out Of Rain: Leading A Health Care Marketing Team Through A Global Pandemic. Subscribe to my Substack: Authentically Authoring Amy to follow my journey as a new author, recovering health care marketer and living life with authenticity.