“Having an ad in the Super Bowl is very high pressure,” says Scott Bell, chief creative officer of the advertising company Droga5, from their office in New York City. “It’s the one thing you do when you know everyone is going to talk about it and have an opinion. The rest of the year, nobody cares. For the Super Bowl, everybody cares!”
So it goes in the life of the advertising companies that try to grab America’s attention every year with a slate of eye-popping ads during the sole night of the year when the commercials in between are just as important, and for some even more important, than the actual game itself. That’s part of the reason why 30-second ad slots for Super Bowl LVII were selling for over $7m.
For Bell, his team has multiple ads running during this year’s game including for the beer giant Molson Coors and streaming service Paramount+. It marks the grand culmination of what amounts to a six-month-long journey to Super Sunday.
“Sometimes you have a really long lead time and other times clients come to us three weeks out and say we have an idea,” says Bell. Case in point: it was only a month ago on the red carpet at the Golden Globes when Jennifer Coolidge said her dream role would be to play a dolphin. This Sunday, she partly achieves that dream in a spot for Elf Cosmetics. (It was written by her White Lotus collaborator, Mike White.)
In Bell’s case, the team at Droga5 knew that Molson Coors wanted a spot sometime last summer and with that in mind, they went to work. “We started off with at least 100 ideas internally,” says Bell. “Finally, we went into one meeting with six different approaches.” What they landed on was a partnership with the gambling site DraftKings which is being positioned as the very first commercial you can officially bet on.
For ad executives, formulating a Super Bowl campaign is a delicate balancing act during which multiple interests are at play. “You want to show something that leaves a mark, is relatable, is connected to the brand and maybe makes people laugh,” said Ciro Sarmiento, the chief creative officer for ad company Saatchi & Saatchi. This year, he helped mastermind a spot for the detergent company Downy starring the actor Danny McBride. “It also has to be an idea that lives beyond the TV ad.”
That means teasers that premiere well before the game, and hooks that give viewers something to chatter about long after a winner is announced. For Sarmiento, he and his team started with 60 Downy ideas. “Then we filtered them down to 20, then 10, then five and then out of those, three made the cut. Finally, you pick the one you want to push for.” Playing on the idea that Downy’s new scent-boosting product Unstoppables freshens clothing for 12 weeks, the ad was teased exactly 12 weeks in advance of its premiere.
“It’s like how Christmas started happening earlier and earlier every year,” says Bell. “Every year teasers get released earlier and earlier.”
When it comes to other recent trends, celebrities continue to reign supreme. Along with Coolidge and McBride, other boldfaced names to look for include Steve Martin and Ben Stiller for Pepsi, as well as Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez for Dunkin’. Meanwhile, Squarespace recruited the actor Adam Driver. And playing on their names, Jon Hamm and Brie Larson will pitch Hellmann’s mayonnaise.
“If you’re gonna be spending this much money on a spot, they want to be sure there’s a certain amount of built-in talk value,” says Bell.
With both Bell and Sarmiento’s ads complete, their Super Sunday duties aren’t finished until they all air. “It’s the most exciting day of the whole process,” says Sarmiento of what’s dubbed the War Room, a newsroom-like atmosphere in which everybody involved in the ads gather to watch their work unfold.
“All of our clients are flying to our offices in New York to join us, our partner agencies and the whole team to enjoy the game and see how we can engage with whatever happens on social media,” says Sarmiento. “So we all have to pay attention. Then, Monday morning will be a little more relaxing.”
