A Few Brands Scored Big From Their Super Bowl 55 Spots—but Just a Few

As most of America knows by now, Super Bowl 55 was a shut out that left the Kansas City Chiefs regretting ever getting on a plane to Tampa, Fla. But when it comes to the game within the Big Game—you know, those pricey advertisements—the Monday morning crowd has much to argue about. While last night’s ad lineup certainly served up a few laughs and misted a few eyes, it was difficult to come away with a hands-down winner. According to consumer insights firm Numerator, Americans were decidedly indifferent about the ads this year, with 73% saying they were either worse or the same as last year. Less than a quarter said the work had improved. With a wounded economy cutting back on advertising budgets and Covid-19 making it a challenge to stage a shoot, many brands that might have attempted something ambitious simply couldn’t or didn’t. Nonetheless, a number of brands did score big, based on the number-crunching of several analytics firms. Adweek has been collecting the results since last night when they first began to trickle in. Below is our distillation on which brands got the biggest lift from the game and which ones, like the Chiefs, probably should have stayed home. First, the buzz P.T. Barnum may have been right when he said there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But by the same token, just because a lot of people talked about an ad doesn’t mean they liked it. According to consumer research firm Brandwatch, Mountain Dew carried the night in terms of conversation. The firm counted some 318,000 mentions of the soft drink during the game—approximately 1,300 per minute. Much of that was likely due to the $1 million contest the ad introduced rather than its dazzling creative work, but attention is attention. Pepsi also started lots of online conversation last night, even though its 60-second spot ran in the weeks leading up to the game but not in the game itself. It was The Weeknd’s 14-minute performance in the halftime show that put the fizz into Pepsi this year, with 240,000 mentions during the game. According to data from social data analytics firm Talkwalker, State Farm’s ad had lots of Americans talking, too. The spot that featured Canadian songwriter and rapper Drake snared nearly 13% of all ad-related mentions, some 52,000 in total as of this afternoon. Cadillac also gained a few miles last night, with marketing software firm Sprinklr placing its total number of mentions and retweets at 13,142. The luxury brand dug into its pockets to hire Timothée Chalamet as Edgar Scissorhands (son of Edward Scissorhands). Like his father, Edgar has a rough time navigating the chores of daily life with scissor blades instead of fingers, but Caddy’s new hands-free Super Cruise feature allowed him to take to the open road safely. Who do you love? Marketing and brand consultancy System1 rated last night’s ads according to emotional effectiveness. After crunching its numbers, it announced that Huggies carried the night. Parent company Kimberly-Clark made a bit of history, too, becoming the first diaper brand to ever advertise in the Big Game. How did a product like diapers stir Americans’ emotions? Well, it wasn’t the diapers that did—it was the babies. Against the backdrop of 463,000 Covid deaths in America, the upbeat message of welcoming new humans into the world was, as the firm put it, “a welcome reminder for viewers that life does go on.” Also ranking high on System1’s list of emotionally effective ads were M&Ms showing Americans being kind to one another, DoorDash’s spot featuring the Sesame Street cast, Nintendo’s ad featuring Serena Williams and Pizza Hut’s ad for its $10 Tastemaker pie featuring Craig Robinson playing Pac-Man in his basement. To measure viewers’ positive emotional response, Sprinklr looked specifically at tweets that contained certain emojis. Doritos’ ad with Matthew McConaughey snared the most laughing face emojis, and Toyota’s ad featuring Paralympic swimmer Jessica Long received the most heart emojis. The highest number of 100 emojis went to Cheetos’ ad, where Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis gave Shaggy’s 2000 hit “It Wasn’t Me” a 2021 reprise. Perhaps not surprisingly, Jeep’s spot with Bruce Springsteen took the most American flag emojis. Risk pays off Another of last night’s brand winners was Ford Motor Company. The ad was a noted departure from the norm and, as such, took some risks in the process. In a year in which advertisers stayed on the safe road (no controversial messages, no politics, only veiled references to the pandemic), Ford’s “Finish Strong” spot popped the clutch in reverse by showing not only people wearing face masks but hospital ICUs, first responders and people getting vaccinated. And it paid off. According to Talkwalker’s data, Ford’s ad generated a positive sentiment of 98.6%. It’s proof that, even in divisive times, consumers will still reward companies that have the courage to take a stand on social issues, as Adweek reported over two years ago. The not-so-super Given the price of entry ($5.5 million for 30 seconds), any Super Bowl ad constituted a gamble. This morning, there are a few that, judging from the data, probably didn’t get their money’s worth. For example, according to Brandwatch, quite a few Americans didn’t care for no-fee trading platform Robinhood’s “We’re All Investors” spot. The problem wasn’t the Super Bowl spot per se, but rather the timing. Two weeks ago, amateur investors on Reddit, galvanized by calls to stick it to hedge funds that were shorting specific stocks, rushed to Robinhood on a buying frenzy that drove heavily-shorted stocks like GameStop to $500 a share. Robinhood then limited GameStop and other company shares. Memories of that kind of volatility apparently cast a pall over Robinhood’s creative effort and turned people off. Uber Eats also came in for some grumbling, racking up a negative sentiment of 88% on Talkwalker's sentiment meter. The problem might have been the cameo from Cardi B, whose presence struck some viewers as unnecessary and confusing. It's also fair to point out that the spot did make a few best-of lists. Oatly, whose CEO Toni Petersson sang for an excruciating 30 seconds, apparently ticked off a fair amount of the populous, too. Finally, there was TurboTax. According to data from Brandwatch, a whopping 86.98% of mentions of the tax prep software’s spot were negative. Some of the chagrin stemmed from reports that parent company Intuit has lobbied for 20 years to keep the government from simplifying tax filing and, hence, ensuring the stability of its franchise. Or maybe viewers just wanted to think about football, not taxes.