A Hellman’s ad with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal revisits the iconic deli scene from When Harry Met Sally.The Associated Press
Out of the dozens of commercials that will air during this year’s Super Bowl – from a fun Michelob Ultra spot featuring Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara as pickleball hustlers to a Hellman’s ad with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal that revisits the iconic deli scene from When Harry Met Sally – one starring Cher may have special significance.
In a spot for Uber Eats, the I Got You Babe singer is transported to the 17th century by a time machine while humming her classic If I Could Turn Back Time. And if nothing else, the ability of the Super Bowl to get more than 100 million Americans to watch ads as they’re being broadcast on television feels like a relic from a distant era.
In Canada, only about 22 per cent of the money spent on ad placements goes toward traditional TV, according to data published last fall by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.
Which is partly why marketers spend kings’ ransoms for the privilege, this year paying a reported US$8-million for 30 seconds of airtime on the Fox broadcast. (Comparable Canadian ad rates are not available.)
“Live broadcast still plays such an important role in the experience,” noted Kevin McHugh, chief strategy officer of ad agency Dentsu Creative Canada, in an interview this week. He pointed out that Canadian viewers are often dismayed by federal regulations, which enable the domestic broadcasters – Bell Media’s CTV, TSN and RDS – to simultaneously substitute Canadian ads, preventing audiences in this country from watching the glossy U.S. spots while they’re airing live on Fox.
“The fact that Canadians have a visceral reaction to that tells me that TV and the ritual of watching the Super Bowl live on TV with friends, it’s a social act, it is a ritual. It is still very important, and I believe it will continue to be important.”
Still, that US$8-million is only the price of entry; marketers have to dream up and produce effective creative that’s going to keep people watching, or they risk breaking the bank for nothing. Many viewers, after all, watch the broadcast with phones at the ready, twitching at the slightest opportunity to be distracted if they’re not entertained every second.
“It’s really where advertisers and creatives as a whole get to push the limits of what’s possible,” McHugh said. “There are three things that every successful campaign has in common. They are memorable, they are meaningful, and they are motivating.” He pointed to a Google campaign promoting the ways in which the company’s Gemini AI service can help small businesses. The tech behemoth will run 50 different spots – one in each U.S. state – that put a local business in the spotlight.
“They’re taking action to connect with small businesses. They’re not just advertising themselves. They’re taking that next step and really doing something meaningful for the audiences they’re advertising to,” McHugh said. “When we think about the real challenge for brands right now, when every brand is just trying to be the loudest, particularly on TV, the brands that are able to act are ultimately going to be able to speak louder and ideally last longer.”
Below, some highlights (which, for Canadian viewers, can already be found online in various places, including the aggregator Superbowl-Ads.com).
An ad for Pringles during this year’s Super Bowl features flying facial hair.The Associated Press
Who ordered the flying mustaches?
This year’s most surreal trend may be airborne facial hair. In a spot for Little Caesars, Eugene Levy is so excited when he takes a bite of one of the pizza chain’s Crazy Puffs bite-size snacks that his iconic eyebrows fly away and cause havoc – distracting a jogger, landing like a mustache above the mouth of an infant and freaking out her mother – before settling back onto his face. In another ad, for Pringles, after actor Adam Brody runs out of the potato flake snack during a party, the mustaches on the faces of Kansas City coach Andy Reid, NBA star James Harden, actor Nick Offerman, and Mr. Potato Head suddenly tear themselves away on an emergency mission to retrieve more tubes of the crunchy treat and deliver them to the bash.
Maybe the Canadian ads will be worth tuning in for, too
In a charming spot made just for the Canadian market – because its archrival, Anheuser-Busch, has exclusive marketing rights for the U.S. broadcast – Molson Coors acknowledges we may all be feeling a little slothful on the morning after the Super Bowl. So, in aid of its “Case of the Mondays” promotion, Coors Light gives us a vision of a city of animated sloths: office sloths falling asleep at their desks, cashier sloths unable to keep up with a conveyer belt of groceries, cycling sloths yawning through class, sloth police trying to catch sloth bank robbers. Here’s hoping the other Canadian-made ads are as much fun.
Coors Light gives us a vision of a city of animated sloths in a commercial for this year’s Super Bowl.The Associated Press
Pickleball: Still not a real sport
Non-football sports are smart enough to get out of the way. But not pickleball, which will be spotlighted in its second Super Bowl in as many years. Last year, eTrade aired an ad featuring two toddlers playing pickleball, which one of them calls, “Basically tennis for babies, but for adults.” This time around, Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara play a couple of sharks who sucker a string of young ‘uns into playing – and then win bucket after bucket of what Anheuser-Busch calls its “active lifestyle light beer.” Which, come to think of it, makes Michelob Ultra sound like the pickleball of brews.
Don’t tell the U.S. President, but DEI is alive and well in Super Bowl ads
It’s probably good that the U.S. President will be attending the game in person and not watching on TV, because otherwise he might be triggered by some of the ads promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.
Dove is back with another addition to its long-running Body Confident campaign that seeks to help girls overcome the persistent negative messaging that pushes them out of sports, with an upbeat spot of a joyful three-year-old girl running down the street to a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run by H.E.R.
As well, the NFL Foundation, a non-profit financed by the league and its clubs, is airing an ad in which three players lead diverse groups of kids – young Black athletes, Special Olympics participants – in inspiring call-and-responses. “My clothes are different. My face is different. My hair is different,” we hear the kids say, as the camera lingers on their hopeful faces. “I must be respected, protected, never rejected.
“I am somebody.”
Amid one of the largest annual celebrations of consumerism, that sounds like a message worth buying.
