WHAT IF THE SUPER BOWL DID STORIES, NOT JUST SPECTACLE?

Homes.com spot is listed as one of the worst Super Bowl ads of 2024 due to its confusing messaging and failure to effectively convey its point.

by Jeff Sweat

Ah, the Super Bowl. It’s the time of year when the advertising industry…loses its damn mind.

Or, at least the marketers and agencies who are in it. I’ve seen brands throw out half their marketing plan for a spot on the Ad Meter. I’ve seen creatives I admire forget their gifts for storytelling in favor of something — anything — big.

That much pressure to succeed, to make it worth a massive chunk of your annual budget disappearing in 30 seconds, would paralyze anyone. That’s why the Super Bowl may be our biggest ad showcase, but it’s not the best. For every “It’s a Tide Ad” or “Halftime in America,” there are dozens of forgettable ads just filling airtime, bouncing somewhere between stupid and safe.

This year offered its share of entertainment, as you’ll find when you read below. But most ads landed squarely in the safe zone which, while a whole lot better than stupid, doesn’t begin to pay off that $7 million investment. A Super Bowl spot isn’t just a bigger stage, it should be a more effective place to state your case.

HOW TO AVOID A SUPER BOWL AD FLOP

Here are two don't's and a do, should you find yourself in a position to make your own Super Bowl spot — or if you’re vying for the chance to be asked.

Don’t make a spectacle.
It’s tempting to feel that because you have the world’s biggest megaphone, you have to yell louder than anyone else. But when everybody is shouting, sometimes it pays to whisper. Think of Volkswagen’s The Force, long viewed as one of the all-time classic Super Bowl ads. As the creative team behind it once told me, take away the mini Darth Vader stuff and it’s a story of a kid and his dad.

Don’t use celebrities as a crutch.
If you made The Force today, the kid would pull off his helmet and wink at the camera. Look: it’s Jenna Ortega from Wednesday! (On second thought, that’d actually be pretty good casting. Dibs!) We are very nearly at the point where it’s career suicide to make a Super Bowl spot with anything other than celebrities, which means we’re also at the point where they’ve almost lost their meaning. Big-name stars are wandering around ads basically looking for a reason to be there because brands haven’t given them one. There were two exceptions to that this year — which is why they made our How to Be Famous, Super Bowl Edition.

Tell a story.
The answer to both of these scenarios is terrifying, and not as simple as it should be: just tell a story. Understand what the brand needs to get across, and the best story to make your point. A story in our world usually doesn’t begin with, “We open on Jon Hamm.” It looks for human, relatable moments, and it builds from there. So figure out the story first. Then, if a celebrity is the best way to tell that story, go for it. If you want to zhuzh it up for that massive audience, do that, too.