The specificity paradox: Winning the game by losing half the audience

If I’ve learned anything about 'game winning' Super Bowl ads over the years, it’s that trying to appeal to everybody is the fastest way to being forgotten. 

You can’t go into it with expectations of satisfying 120 million people. The most memorable ads usually do the opposite; they confuse half the audience by being ferociously specific to the other half.

You can’t go into it with expectations of satisfying 120 million people.

I bet the Budweiser frogs bombed in testing. Coinbase's bouncing QR code looked like a technical glitch. And Reddit bought five seconds to tell everyone they couldn't afford more. All these ads worked because they refused to look like Super Bowl ads.

Above: Coinbase's 2022 Super Bowl spot looked like a technical glitch, but it got people talking. 

If you're briefing your team on anticipated trends, your ad is already lost in a sea of sameness. The real challenge isn't making a great ad, it's making something specific enough to interrupt an argument about whether that was actually a catch. I think the best spots feel like they barely made it to air because they're terrifyingly different. Something so unapologetically itself it makes people forget they're sitting down to watch an hour of ads. 

Research deck traps

Here's what happens in most pre-Super Bowl briefings: someone shows up with a deck full of 'insights' about what performed last year. 

Humour is up. Nostalgia is trending. Celebrity cameos drove X percent more social mentions. Babies and puppies pull heart strings. 

And, just like that, you're building a Frankenstein's monster designed to chase a conversation nobody is asking for. I wasn’t born yet, but I doubt Apple's 1984 came from a trends deck. It came from treating the Super Bowl like a film premiere. They sold a myth, not features. When Volkswagen ran The Force in 2011 [below], they weren't following a playbook, they were quietly proving that the conversation before the game could matter as much as the sixty seconds during it.

The Snickers spot with Betty White worked because it was built on one brutally clear product truth, not because someone optimised it for universal appeal. Half the audience had no idea why an elderly woman was getting tackled in a pickup football game. The other half couldn't stop talking about it. 

Above: VW wasn't following a formula in 2011 with its hugely popular Star Wars-themed spot.

Courage can smell like confusion

I've sat in enough conference rooms (or Zoom meetings these days) to know what kills specificity, and it's the need to explain everything to everyone. Someone always asks, "But what if people don't get it?" That question has murdered more great ideas than a bad brief ever has.

"But what if people don't get it?" That question has murdered more great ideas than a bad brief ever has.

Tide's It's a Tide Ad campaign in 2018 [below] hijacked the entire language of Super Bowl advertising and turned other brands' tropes into their punchline. It was confusing if you tuned in late. Brilliant if you were paying attention. Doritos handed creative control to their audience through Crash the Super Bowl and let amateurs outperform agencies. Old Spice's The Man Your Man Could Smell Like became synonymous with Super Bowl greatness, despite airing right after the game, not during it.

None of these were safe bets. They were specific bets. 

The no-shows

Then there's the stuff that didn't need airtime at all. Oreo's Dunk in the Dark tweet during the 2013 blackout won the night without buying a spot. JCPenney's mittens tweet in 2014 became one of the most talked-about moments of the game by pretending to drunk-tweet. They understood something; you don't need to spend $8+ million to be part of the conversation. You just need to find the right moment to say something worth repeating.

The Super Bowl has become so expensive and so risk-averse that the actual disruption now can happen in the margins, with the brands’ nimble and brave enough to play a different game entirely.