When a Super Bowl ad fetches between $6.5 million to $7 million for just 30 seconds of airtime, it’s no wonder many brands opt to run short versions of their commercials on game day. But shorter doesn’t always mean better, a phrase that rang especially true this year.
Most of the Super Bowl 58 ads that proved popular among critics and consumers were the 60- or 90-second versions that never aired on TV, while some of the 30-second cutdowns that ran during the broadcast fell flat.
In today’s media landscape, it’s become the norm for Super Bowl advertisers to extend their campaigns beyond a brief TV break. Many release long-form versions of their spots before the game and strive to capture attention through other avenues including social media, online content or in-person activations.
The days of relying on one standalone moment may be over, but 30 seconds can still make all the difference among viewers. When the game is wider, the art of short storytelling is becoming increasingly harder for Super Bowl advertisers to master.
David Kolbusz, chief creative officer of agency Orchard Creative, which made Etsy’s Super Bowl ad this year, advised brands and agencies making ads to “always plan on the shortest version of a spot that is most coherent.” But perhaps counterintuitively, he prefers to “tell the longest version of the story first, and then whittle it down from there to the key components.”
“It’s like turning a block of marble into a sculpture–it’s harder to add things on later,” he said.
A common danger in cutting down ads is losing the narrative structure, Kolbusz continued: “A lot of the stories [in this year’s Super Bowl] don’t have that much of a coherent, narrative thrust.”
The best 30-second spots are conceived with that format in mind, according to Shayne Millington, chief creative officer at McCann New York, whose agency made this year’s NYX beauty spot with Cardi B.
“If you go at it as a 60 and then cut it to a 30, you’re never going to win,” Millington said. “You’ll have a 30 that doesn’t land.”
The team at Erich & Kallman made the Reese’s Super Bowl spot specifically as a 30 and packed it with action in the form of sight gags and physical humor.
“They had a simple idea and a great execution,” Millington said, “because they started from that point.”
At the same time, it may be more challenging to stand out during the event amid brands like State Farm, Dunkin’ and Verizon that invested in one-minute buys.
“30s don’t just get judged against other 30s,” Millington said. “And 60s have an upper hand.”
While 60-second ads seem to get an inordinate amount of attention, having that become the standard would “sound so privileged, and it might suggest that new brands can’t enter the space, and that’s not true,” Millington said. “The 30s just have to be done really well.”
Much depends on the runway to the Super Bowl, Millington said, and in crafting a 360-degree media plan around the ad launch “to make more of the moment.”
“You have to tell a great teaser story,” Millington said. “You have to be standout or cheeky, different, controversial, have talkability and have a really smart social plan in place to react to that.”
In the real world, outside of the Big Game arena, “30s are a luxury on a normal broadcast,” Millington said, noting that brands are asking for more 15-second and 6-second spots.
Agencies are increasingly accustomed to working with shorter slots “and what’s required is that you really embrace the time constraint,” Millington said.
For Kawasaki’s first Super Bowl ad called “Mullets,” Goodby Silverstein + Partners worked with production house The Mill (which also produced Super Bowl ads for BMW, Doritos and Starry) on a 45-second spot that debuted on digital and social media on Jan. 22.
The extended Kawasaki spot contained a number of hairdo jokes, the central conceit, giving follicular makeovers to Stone Cold Steve Austin, a grizzly bear, a bald eagle and other human and animal characters.
But one got dropped in editing for the on-air version of the ad, which ran at 30 seconds.
Christian Nielsen, creative director at The Mill’s Los Angeles studio, knew the ad would be trimmed for the game, resigning himself to a kill-your-darlings approach.
“I do feel it’s a shame—the turtle didn’t make it into the 30,” Nielsen said. “It’s nice to have more time to tell the narrative.”
Because there’s so much publicity around the early rollouts of the ads, brands often rely on consumers to watch the hero spots.
“It seems to be less and less about Super Bowl night and more about the time leading up to it,” Nielsen said. “You can’t call it a Super Bowl commercial unless it runs in the Super Bowl, but maybe you can do the cheaper buy if you’ve done a strong push in the lead-up weeks.”
