5 of the best Super Bowl ads of all time
Ahead of the 2024 Super Bowl, The Growth Agenda asked some of Australia’s top creative advertising leaders to share their most loved commercials.
The coveted advertising spots during the Super Bowl promise fame and often fortune for brands that use the air time effectively. To make the multi-million dollar investment worth the money, creativity is king, Australia’s top creative advertising leaders say.
Ahead of the 2024 Super Bowl, The Australian asked five creatives from across the country to share their favourite advertisement of all time.
Alex Derwin, chief creative officer, BMF
Coming from a creative agency that believes in long term brand effects and has built its reputation on production craft this is an unusual pick from me. Coinbase is a 60-second direct response ad that likely cost US$12 million ($18.4m) in media, but less than US$10k ($15,000) in production. And yet it produced 20 million visits to the Coinbase website in under a minute, propelled the app from 186th on the App Store chart to number two, and turned a billion people on to the mixed blessings of a crypto future.
Beyond the short-term conversion of 20 million customers, I’d also argue that this ad made a strong statement about the brand. When every Super Bowl follows a formula – sign up a big celebrity tease it in the week leading up to game day, be ready to leverage the online conversation during and after the event – it delighted in blowing up the convention and making us watch a QR code bouncing around a black screen like it was the screensaver of an old DVD player. Out went star power, storytelling, and try-hard public relations campaigns. In came a brazen lack of respect for convention. For an industry that is upending the financial establishment, and decentralising economic power I think the zero-f*****-given attitude is bang on.
Toby Talbot, chief creative officer (Australia and New Zealand), Ogilvy Network
In 2018, I was working at Saatchi & Saatchi when the New York office nailed the Super Bowl for Procter & Gamble with ‘It’s a Tide Ad’. And when I say nailed, they completely knocked it out of the park (if I can mix baseball terminology with NFL). It’s still my favourite. Not just because I’m a huge David Harbour fan. But because Tide hijacked the ad breaks by turning every ad into a Tide ad. Seven of them. That couldn’t have been cheap. Harbour popped up post Super Bowl, even as part of the broadcast. #TideAd trended on Twitter and as befits great advertising ideas, it wasn’t long before people were generating their own #TideAd content.
Rob Reilly, global chief creative officer, WPP
Tide and Saatchi & Saatchi’s 2018 ‘It’s a Tide Ad’ is one of my all-time favourite Super Bowl spots. It’s extremely clever. It changed the way we look at Super Bowl advertising and how a brand has the potential to ‘own’ it for the entire game.
Another favourite of mine is the 2000 ad from E-Trade and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners with the Monkey. It was a brilliant concept based on a very strong strategy, and the execution is so absurd that you can’t forget it.
Simon Langley, group chief creative officer, Bastion Creative
So many brilliant spots to choose from over the years, from Old Spice to Tide and many, many more. But the one I feel became a cultural phenomenon and engaged myself and my friends like no other, was Bug Light’s Wassup. I love its simplicity. A great truth about mates, and the way they behave.
Remarkably, it started out as a short film, spotted by a creative team at a festival which they showed their client Budweiser, who loved it. Charles Stone III, the film’s original director brilliantly brought it to life and “Wassssuuuuuuuuuup” became the greeting of the year 2000. It also found its way onto the front page of newspapers, on talk shows, in Scary Movie and numerous parodies. I can only imagine how it would have blown up with all the social platforms we have available today! So, what will I be doing this Super Bowl? Watching the game, having a Bud…of course.
Avish Gordhan, chief creative officer at Saatchi & Saatchi Australia
One of my favourite Super Bowl ads didn’t actually run during the Super Bowl. Well… not with the astronomical price tag that media placement is known for. Volvo didn’t have the budget to be on-air during the game. Their competitors did.
So the Swedish car manufacturer chose to hijack their competitors’ viewers instead. “Volvo Interception” was an eye-wateringly simple idea where every time you saw a (competitor) car ad during the game, you could tweet a friend’s name with #VolvoContest to win a Volvo. Low-key genius.
Considering people often watch the Super Bowl just for the ads, to be able to get them to switch attention to your online campaign is nothing short of extraordinary. The campaign nailed the results too – generating leads, building love and ensuring Volvo was the only car brand trending online during the game.
In a time where so many clients’ budgets are under strain and there’s a lot of pressure to deliver results, Volvo is a lesson. Creativity, at its core, is not about big celebs, 90-second cuts and huge soundtracks. First and foremost, creativity relies on behaving unlike anyone else.
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