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The Super Bowl. Arguably our industry’s most famous stage. Perhaps the only remaining annual mass-reach-ad-attentive media environment - where ad breaks are not intermissions – presenting a seductive siren to marketers seeking eyeballs. Amid our industry’s current over-obsession with the performance drug - feeding more and more dollars to algorithmically determined short-term gains - it can feel like the Super Bowl is the last bastion of unapologetic awareness guaranteeing, long-term brand building, fame making.

​And understandably so, the live event abides by many of the laws of brand fame, studied and documented by the academics of ads - mass reach of over 200 million people, primed to diffuse messages in their socials, permission for brands to experiment with more distinctive creative assets that break from the shackles of everyday “campaigning”. But the Super Bowl is far from a fame-making guarantee, and this year’s long line of hopefuls were no exception.

Did Prime sports drink need a multi-million-dollar Super Bowl spot given the unprecedented free fame the brand has achieved in its first year? Sold out everywhere with frenzied shoppers trying to get their hands on a single bottle and a massive secondary market price inflation mimicking the type of fame only seen in hype culture – largely orchestrated by the brand’s larger than life YouTube celebrity backers, Logan Paul and KSI. Having just announced an exclusive sponsorship deal with the UFC, it's pretty clear that the brand’s Super Bowl debut will be entirely forgotten - and early data from Sprinklr, the social analytics platform, suggest it may already have been.

Then there is the case of Disney. Oh my, 100 years of storytelling passion reduced to a 90-second Disney-verse supercut. The world’s greatest storytelling machine celebrates its centennial and this totally safe, utterly unimaginative montage played like a mediocre internal corporate mood film when it could have been a timeless, generation-defying homage to uniting people in the spirit of imagination. Must try harder.

Overall defying many a recent Super Bowl, the action on the field was far more engaging than the action in the ad breaks. It generally felt like film craft and the heart-warming, gut-wrenching storytelling with a real POV of years past has been replaced by lazy celebrity tokenism – from Snoop Dogg to Pete Davidson, Adam Driver to Brie Larson, plus Serena in two separate booze spots, I would wager nobody remembers what these stars were repping today. The nostalgic trip down entertainment memory lane via Clueless, Breaking Bad, Caddyshack, Cliffhanger and Zoolander was entertaining though somewhat equally run of the mill.

Given the role the media has played in fueling some of our fundamental divisions and challenges, it was perhaps surprising we didn’t see more Fame making tap into rousing “it’s halftime in America” speeches, or maybe a gratuitous yet hopeful “buy the world a …” (Coke) anthem – there has been a long legacy of marketers using the biggest media stage to unite people in culture and around shared experiences - though the notable absence of tech, web3 and social platforms speaks volumes to the world we are living in today - or maybe Elon Musk sitting next to Rupert Murdoch is the image that speaks a thousand words.

Perhaps the only advertiser that came close to revisiting the brand purpose space was He Gets Us, which makes sense for a campaign to promote Jesus and Christianity, though no doubt that in itself will prove divisive –running two ads during the game as part of a $100 million dollar media investment is staggering for a non profit, and as of writing, it’s the second most mentioned ad of the night on social according to Sprinklr data.

You must applaud brands that did double down on their uniqueness and just used this massive stage to amplify, not convolute, their brand’s best self – Ben Affleck and Dunkin, rooted in Bostonian culture, set in a Dunkin drive-thru, with real customers - comical, memorable and the JLo cameo gave this massive cultural clout – well played.

GM and Netflix also deserve a mention. While the Will Ferrel road trip around popular Netflix franchises was unmistakably entertaining, it may have distracted from what could be a much more impactful, and lasting, fame-builder for both brands. The spot launched a commitment for Netflix to feature GM electric vehicles in original shows reflecting society’s increasing excitement about an all-electric future, and as GM CMO Deborah Wall put it, “entertainment has a huge impact on culture. We want to make EVs famous on streaming, small and silver screens to build an EV culture through storytelling that incorporates the experiences of driving and owning an EV.” That’s a cause we can all get behind, and a great example of two seemingly unrelated brands joining forces for good.

For other marketers thinking of being enticed by the Super Bowl fame machine, don’t forget, fame can fade fast. Following FTX’s epic downfall, it appears we should all have been a bit “more like Larry” following Sam Bankman-Fried’s big bet on the big game last year.

Final thought on fame. It can be just noise without flow. Flow is the frictionless movement of consumers along their journey with a brand. Without it, fame can be ephemeral, forgotten by the time the world clocks into work on Monday morning – especially if you are a brand trying to break onto the scene, with little or no existing presence. Now we’re seeing brands tap into flow-making tactics even on the biggest stage.

Last year’s bouncing QR code by Coinbase was a brilliantly lo-fi rebuttal of everything Super Bowl advertising has built. Tapping a pandemic-resurrected behaviour, snapping QR codes, was so enticing that millions of people left the game and signed up for $15 in free bitcoin on the crypto-wallet. It was a masterclass in hacking behaviour to generate first party data, hugely accelerate acquisition and, ultimately, create customer flow. Fast forward one year, and every unimaginative advertiser has stuck a static QR on their spot – from the MLB to Limit Break – most of which had no promotion or compelling incentive to pull people in, or worse, once led to broken landing pages with zero call to action. Hopefully flooding the space with QRs has simultaneously proven that it may only work when you were the first to do it.

Uber did something audacious - use the famous Super Bowl stage to launch the ultimate flow machine – a loyalty programme bringing Uber and Uber Eats under Uber One – complete with all the trappings of Fame: a star-studded crew led by Diddy, a catchy new earworm of a jingle courtesy of nostalgic early ‘90s throwback Haddaway, and a wonderfully worded CTA “One membership to save on Uber and Uber Eats, get that stuck in your head”. Excited to see this programme unfold.

But the flow champion goes to Tubi, the free streaming service. Tubi ran a somewhat terrifying spot featuring human-size easter bunnies kidnapping people from their everyday lives and forcefully throwing them into rabbit holes – where they are subjected to an endless tunnel of screens meant to represent Tubi’s extensive content library. It was all a little too Clockwork Orange for me, but fairly run of the mill 60 second ad playbook stuff. But the genius took place sometime later, deep in the fourth quarter, when a cursor scrolled down the screen, selecting the Tubi app, exiting the Super Bowl stream and then exploring the Tubi platform. Millions of people around the world simultaneously panicked and searched for their remote thinking someone had accidentally switched “channels”, while the brand simultaneously showed millions of people where to find, and how to use, Tubi on their device (in just 15 seconds I might add). A stroke of media genius delivered as a simple UX demo - leading to the most talked about brand of the entire game, with the most laughing emojis in social media (Sprinklr) and almost certainly a lot more people giving Tubi a try.

That’s a wrap for another year. Now back to building brand fame and accelerating customer flow every other day of the year. If you’re interested in how Initiative builds fame and flow for some of the world’s most ambitious brands, get in touch, or come join the team.