The game, which aired Sunday on NBC, included more than a dozen first-time Super Bowl advertisers, including shopping-rewards platform Rakuten Rewards, children’s budgeting app maker Green light Financial Technology Inc., mobile sports gambling operator Caesars at-home Covid-19 test provider Cue Health Inc. and Wall box NV, which makes electric-vehicle charging technologies. This year’s Super Bowl drew advertisers willing to pay up to $7 million for a 30-second spot. WSJ advertising editor Suzanne and reporter Paul break down what to watch for from both new cryptocurrency brands and old regulars like Budweiser. Coinbase tried to intrigue viewers with an ad that displayed nothing but a slowly bouncing QR code, which led to an online offer of free bitcoin for new customers.
The Cue Health commercial wasn’t the only ad with a theme of health and wellness. Planet Fitness Inc.’s first Super Bowl ad showed actress Lindsay Lohan putting her party days behind her, while an ad from medical technology company ho logic Inc. featured singer Mary J. Blige encouraging women to get medical screenings.
It made sense to see health and wellness reflected in the Super Bowl ad roster following two years of a pandemic, professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University.
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The influx of first-timers continued a trend from last year, when a group of marketers that did well during the first part of the pandemic bought their first Super Bowl commercials. This cryptocurrency and gambling came on strong.
Cryptocurrency exchanges including Coinbase Global Inc., FTX and Crypto.com made their Super Bowl debuts as they try to become household names. Their ads were tasked with engaging both crypto superfans and a broader audience that is less familiar with the subject. We’re hopefully getting out of a very scary time, but there are other issues that need to be tackled.
After travel marketers took a break from the Super Bowl last year, marketers like Booking Holdings Inc. and Expedia Group Inc. bought ad time this year as travel picks back up.
Advertisers in the first Super Bowl of the pandemic in February 2021 were tasked with setting the right tone for an event that took place before widespread vaccination against Covid-19 and soon after the divisive presidential election. Some ads in last year’s game alluded to the pandemic, though primarily with oblique references and humor. Jeep ran a somber two-minute commercial acknowledging the division in the country. This year’s Super Bowl advertising was more standard fare.
The ads delivered “the tried and true approaches that have always worked in the game to entertain people and engage them and be effective,” said Mr. Newman of Mullen Lowe. “They’re babies, they’re puppies, they’re big physical humor, cinematic productions, nostalgic music, those sorts of things.”
An ad for Frito-Lay’s Doritos and Cheetos Flamin’ Hot varieties, for example, included a rendition of the 1980s hit “Push It” and the voices of musicians Megan Thee Stallion and Charlie Puth emerging from the mouths of a songbird and a fox, respectively. There was really a more serious tone in last year, and at that time, we continued to really provide what we thought was a moment of release, said Rachel Ferdinando, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Frito-Lay North America, which also ran a commercial for Lay’s potato chips. “In some ways, [this year] was staying the course for us. Maybe for others it’s going to be a pivot.”
Mullen Lowe’s ad for Morgan Stanley’s E*Trade trading platform returned the brand’s spokes baby, once a Super Bowl staple, to the game’s ad roster after nearly a decade in retirement.
Anheuser-Busch InBev SA’s Budweiser brought back its famous Clydesdale's in this year’s ad, titled “A Clydesdale’s Journey.” It features a horse becoming injured, then eventually recovering enough to run again, and concludes with the words, “In the home of the brave, down never means out.”
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