The Super Bowl ad winners are in. Can DoorDash deliver anything? Apparently, not the radical love of Jesus.
A friend sent me that Instagram reel yesterday poking fun at how annoying it must be to watch the Super Bowl with people in the brand & advertising world and well, I wish I could say that this WASN’T me last night. But yeah, it was…
What can I say? I center my vocation around helping Christ-led brands be relevant and resonant in today's world. And in my experience, brand building has a lot to do with how that happens.
But this is also why paying attention to the Super Bowl matters so much — when a brand is going to invest $7 million in a 30-second TV spot, it’s because they believe that this price tag is going to be worth it.
What you are watching represents Big Advertising’s best thinking on how to either stir interest in a brand, cement customer loyalty or boost sales — and that’s why it’s worth paying attention to regardless of whether you will ever play on that stage.
And stage it is. As Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, chief marketing officer for DoorDash (whose ad was a winner last night), told CBS MoneyWatch. "It's the one time you have left [in the U.S.] where you can have 100 million people-plus paying attention to the same thing."
Every day, like it or not, the competition for our attention just gets more and more fierce. The rise and speed of digital technology and the social media attention economy have made reach so easy that every company & cause is playing a constant tug-of-war for people’s time & attention just to survive. As my colleague Mark Neigh, who runs Infinite Media, Masterworks’ Christian Ad Network & Media Division, likes to say:
“Advertising is an infinite endeavor, where the game of staying memorable cannot be won — but it can be lost by not playing at all.”
Heck, I’ve probably already lost half of the people reading this article because I took two minutes to set a little context instead of diving right into the commercials and the key takeaways — but we’re busy people and this world never turns off, right?
Well, props to those taking the time to sit outside of that world for a few minutes. I promise that the ultimate goal of this article is to bless you with insights from a world a little outside your own.
Last year, I broke down the top 5 winners and losers of the game, but this year, I’m sticking with just the winners so I can spend a little more time explaining why they won. Plus, the Masterworks Marketing team will be so proud of my selections because not one of these winning ads has to do with alcohol.
And without further ado, here are the winners of last night’s Big Ad Game:
WIN: SNAPCHAT PICKS A NEW FIGHT
As a marketing professional, father, and follower of Jesus who loathes Social Media with every fiber of my being and finds its redemptive qualities cannot justify its salvation, I can say that this ad spoke directly to me. While the only “digital connection” platform I put any energy into is Marco Polo, this ad may have nudged me into giving Snapchat a third chance.
Before this commercial is going to make sense as to why it’s a top contender, you need to understand something about Category Design.
Our brains are wired to categorize things. That’s how we understand the world around us. Every brand exists within a Category. These Categories allow us to connect problems we face with solutions around us. More and more, our brains are leaning on categories to cope with the over-stimulated, crazy world we live in. In fact, according to the folks at Play Bigger, our brains turn to more than 50 cognitive biases that push us to decisions not based on facts and logic, but on instincts.”
These biases created by categories mean that, quite often, once we have placed a brand as being the best in a category, our brains have a hard time switching this — even if the product is sub-par.
Clorox Bleach is a great example of this because its category, Bleach, is a regulated product (meaning by law, Clorox has to be chemically identical to every other no-name brand of bleach). But many people swear that Clorox does a better job of bleaching their clothes than other brands. It doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter, because Clorox has cemented itself in people’s minds as the category king and thus, the best solution provider for their problem.
Snapchat is not at the top of its category as a business. So the ad you watched last night was instead an attempt to redesign and redefine its category to position itself as a Category King of their own.
How? Snapchat went straight for the jugular with a disruptive manifesto that drives at the heart of everything we all know is wrong with their current associated category — Social Media.
Snapchat wants to get people to think about them differently. This ad is an incredible example of Category Design because it works to get people to see a problem with one category and offers a different category in which Snapchat is positioning itself as the leader.
Similar to what Uber did with taxis and what Airbnb did with hotels.
What’s the category? Well, they don’t define it outright. They say their category is Snapchat. But if I had to try to define it, I’d say it’s Digital Friendship.
When doing Category Design, you don’t focus on your product right away, you focus on the problem and the solution. This is why they aren’t driving traffic to snapchat.com or telling people to go download Snapchat at the end of the video. They are telling you to go to moresnapchat.com, their market-defining opus.
The way this Manifesto is done is masterful in so many ways.
The score is brilliant. It starts with a very familiar sound of instruments tuning up for an orchestral performance. This is layered with the sounds of dings and clicks we all have come to know as modern-day phone notifications. If you read the website, you can connect this to the opening of their thesis: “The promise of social media started out great. It was a place where we could connect with people and share bits of our lives. A place where we could be a part of something bigger than ourselves — where we could feel supported and loved.” Those dings and that orchestral score quickly become overpowered with a discordant cacophony instead of a beautiful symphony — the Social Media orchestra failed. But then something different is heard. Jazz. Funk. A crowd. A voice. Human music-making. And it is a PARTY. And it feels like the best kind of FOMO you could hear. Something better than Social Media.
The visuals do the same thing as the score. It starts with an ad that looks like a polished, corporate, Apple ad. The promise of a technological utopia where more is better. The lie begins to show. And then that false utopia starts to glitch out. A glitch in this matrix? A psychedelic trip down ‘meme-ory’ lane. You're swirling down a rabbit hole that takes you back to middle school inside jokes and a bedroom wall plastered with photos of friendship and fun where life was so sweet.
And even though the video was incredible, the destination is even more poignant. It is anti-everything that is toxic to social media. On the website, you can’t even scroll through it fast. It forces you to slow down and pay attention to the words and thoughts and your challenged assumptions. The Snapchat icon is locked in position and each point delivers added insights for you to discover.
Will it work as intended and will Snapchat get people to engage in a better solution to our Social Media doom-scrolling and polarizing addictions? I’m not sure, but for all our sakes, I sure hope it does.
While we are on the topic of Category Wars, let’s talk about the delivery category, head-to-head.
WIN: DOORDASH BEATS UBER EATS
Uber Eats played last year’s playbook by cramming as many high-priced celebrity-driven pop-culture mashups as they could fit into a single ad. DoorDash instead created a promotional experience that actually said something about what the category of decentralized delivery is all about.
The concept behind Uber Eats’ ad was fun and funny — but it was also defensive and insecure. They came out saying, “Don’t forget about us over here, we are like DoorDash too!” The big problem with the ad was all in the delivery. They mashed up so many different celebrity vignettes into a single 30-second spot that you ended up forgetting almost every single one of them. Within 10 seconds of the ad airing, I asked around the room and most people could only remember the Friends reunion and then spent so long trying to remember the rest that they forgot what the ad’s message was.
DoorDash, on the other hand, gave me a wild ride that led me deep into the inner circles of Reddit where a body of code crackers were annotating frame-by-frame a seriously long-winded promo code to win one of everything that was advertised on the Super Bowl. Within 20 minutes of the spot airing, the code was cracked and thousands of people were playing and having a frustrating amount of fun.
In the end, Uber Eats told us they can DoorDash us pretty much anything. Doordash showed us they can DoorDash us pretty much anything. You see what happened there? I used Doordash as Uber Eats’ verb for food delivery — that’s just what we call it in our household. And that is why Doordash won. The Doordash ad was like a Coca-cola ad — made by a company that is #1 in their category, while the Uber Eats ad was like a defensive Pepsi ad.
PS: if you want that promo code to enter the DoorDash sweepstakes, email me and I’ll hook you up.
While scrolling down the full list of items you get if you win the big DoorDash prize, you may notice they missed one brand from their list.
One thing that DoorDash apparently can’t deliver you is the world-bending love of Jesus.
WIN: HE GETS US LOVES LOUDER
Honestly, I was worried about the He Gets Us Super Bowl spots this year. I feared they were going to stay too close to their formula from last year that they would lose part of what makes the brand so relevant and resonant — the edgy and fresh confrontation of their storytelling. But it didn’t disappoint. In fact, they brought back just enough of last year’s brand markers in their slideshow format that a few people at the watch party who aren’t Christians even said “Oh, this must be that Jesus ad”.
This year, He Gets Us used an absolutely stunning series of painterly portrayals of foot washing that could have easily been a trending post in the r/AccidentalRenaissance subreddit. They reminded me the heart of what Bryan Zahnd’s Beauty Will Save the World and Alan Noble’s Destructive Witness books are pleading for in their incredible portrayal of Christlike modern allegories. It reminded me I haven’t really seen powerful “Christian art” like this since well, let's just say long before Thomas Kinkade ruined the category… Massive props to my friends over at LERMA/ & Brand Haven for a job well done on this piece.
Last year I wrote about the He Get’s Us campaign when it first aired on the Super Bowl, offering a lot of hope mixed with cautious hesitations as to whether it would be an effective effort or not. Well, this year I got the chance to work with He Gets Us on a small project and saw behind the curtain what God was doing through that campaign. The results are truly priceless — over 360,000 people connected to local churches and ministries through the campaign. Over 7,000 people directed to suicide prevention ministries. Countless stories of salvation and healing and radical forgiveness and marital reconciliation and baptism.
Already, the media is, once again, touting this year’s ad as a controversial mixed-bag that right-wingers are calling “woke Jesus” (likely because they feel convicted as the offenders in this picture) and left-wingers are saying “you could feed a lot of people with that Super Bowl money” (as if God’s economy was one of scarcity and not abundance). Plus, I know who some of the donors are and yes, they are ALSO feeding a lot of people. So my encouragement to you in reading this as you’ve likely faced with your own ministry is this: we play by the rules of God’s Kingdom, not this one. Our brands live in this world, but should be of His world.
What God asks of us is not the pursuit of results, but faithfulness and trust in his calling. We plant the seeds; he reaps of the harvest. Let the media say what it will because on the other side of many TV screens in the United States tonight was someone who saw themselves and their hurt in that ad and another seed of a loving Savior was planted. Remember: the media said the same things last year and yet many people were radically loved.
I am incredibly hopeful about this brand moving into the next year, and I can also say for anyone wondering if a big bold brand-forward vision like this can actually work, I can say yes, yes it can. On this earth as it is in Heaven.
While we are on the subject of using art to engage us in an ad, in comes a pharmaceutical company to remind me of what it means to rally people to a cause and is my top pick of the year.
THE BIG WIN: PFIZER PULLED HEARTS IN AND THEN BROKE THEM
The first thing that makes this ad so engaging is that you don’t know who it is for, but you are so drawn in by the use of a world-renowned song turned into a kitschy chorus of animated mouths that gives strong Nickelodeon meets ‘Night at the Museum’ vibes.
This is fun. This is cool. This is an ad for… SCIENCE? Kind of. Oh wait, this just got… real. It’s for Cancer. Just then my wife and I turn to each other to find both of us crying, heavy, but hopeful… in Pfizer? Never before have I thought to myself, if anyone can beat Cancer, Pfizer can do it! But here I was thinking those exact thoughts.
What happened? Well, I think what they did was ‘Barbie-movie’ the commercial. If you watched that movie, you may get what I mean by that. If you didn’t, let me try and explain without spoiling the movie…
The Barbie movie starts as one thing, something that is light and airy, fun and goofy. Sure, you know there’s an important narrative, but it’s also just extremely entertaining and light-hearted at the same time. And then, suddenly you’re almost 80% of the way through that movie, and the beauty of the female experience flashes before your eyes with Billie Eilish whispering “What was I made for?” straight to the center of your being and you are wrecked. And the meaning of the Barbie doll changes forever. More on what you can learn from the Barbie movie as a nonprofit here.
I think this is why I find this Pfizer ad so strong and what I think we all need to do as Christ-led organizations for the sake of our causes. We need to tell a perception-bending story that sucks people in and then righteously wrecks them. I mean, I have seen countless cancer awareness ads, 5Ks, appeals, pink ribbons, and celebrity endorsements, and none of them made me as hopefully motivated to find a cure as that Pfizer ad just did.
You see, Pfizer is tapping into something really important about the human psyche, the same thing that category leaders are doing too, the same reason the Super Bowl itself is such a spectacle. As beings created to be in community, we want to hop on the bandwagons of winning teams. Pfizer just told us they were the team that was going to win, and I started to believe it enough to take the time to go to LetsOutdoCancer.com where they continued to build up my sense of confidence in them.
Ask yourself, does my brand come across as a Winning Team to the masses? Are we showing up in a way that builds confidence in our mission and tells a story that people want to hop on the bandwagon for? Most ministries I see focus way more on the crisis and the need more than the cure. But that was the motivation of the last generation, not the next one. In other words, they aren’t engaging in what is relevant and resonant for today’s rapidly changing world. So let’s talk about how we make sure we are.
TAKEAWAY TIME
So what can the winners of the SuperBowl Ads show us about how to be Relevant & Resonant as Christ-led brands in 2024?
Well, for one, if you read any other Super Bowl ad article in the next few days, you’ll probably see a completely different rank based on vapid Celebrity power and cheap humor vs brand resonance. And well, as long as everyone agrees that the TEMU ad was the worst thing to happen in 2024 so far, they have their place.
But the reason my four top ads were chosen for this article is because they contain lessons and insights that are important for Christ-led brands to pay attention to. Let’s go.
INSIGHT #1: Your category (aka cause) matters a lot.
Whether you are fighting for category position, already a category king, or trying to create a new category because yours is tainted (if everyone in your space is all struggling, this is you), this is a massive theme of the Super Bowl’s ad strategy.
For non-profits, your product categories are tied to your causes. Here are some things I want you to ask yourself this week:
What is your category/cause and are you the poster child for that cause? If the answer is no, the next questions you should ask yourself are: Can I become it, or is my cause too crowded (like insurance) or tainted (like social media or soda pop)? If so, can I create an adjacent category that people can become passionate about and I can win in?
INIGHT #2: People need a story to fit into.
Many commodities necessitated by modern life lack a survival-based selling point like needing to eat, sleep, or breathe. Insurance, for example, is not only inedible but intangible. It is a resource that customers hope never to need, a product that functions somewhat like a tax on security or fear.
Because it is so intangible, the average person cannot identify which qualities, if any, distinguish one company’s insurance from another’s and which should truly matter.
Likewise, for most Christ-led ministries, what you ultimately deliver is the Gospel and a path to a transformed life. So in a world where hundreds of ministries are all talking to the same orbit of engaged Christians, talking about what you do and sharing stories of lives changed because of what you do just won't cut it like it used to when there were fewer voices in the room and a generation that responded well to those tactics.
What all these brands in the for-profit space have learned over the last decade that shows up in Super Bowl ads is that they do a lot better to attract business not by selling what they do or make but by successfully ascribing positive characteristics to anthropomorphize their companies and products in ads. In the brand world, we call this your Brand’s Emotional and Self-Expressive Benefits.
When Google tells a story of a visually impaired man now able to capture photos of his family thanks to a product, we ascribe all of those good feelings about the story to Google itself. And that is what makes us want to hop on (or stay on) the Google bandwagon.
All the most incredible ads are based on compelling stories that shape the way we feel about the brand or feel about ourselves. They aren’t driven by offers; they are driven by brand stories.
What’s tricky about the cause world is that our audience is often not the direct beneficiary. But if Pfizer can tell a powerful story that makes us think differently about the fight to cure cancer, so can you.
INSIGHT #3: Brand Passion is more important than Brand Loyalty
My last takeaway, and probably the most important for our critical moment as Christ-led brands is about Brand Passion.
The secret of Super Bowl ads is ultimately about finding people to become passionate about a brand — meaning passionate enough to talk about it with others.
I am a very loyal Meijer Shopper (that’s a grocery store in the mid-west). Why? Because they are close and I know where everything is so I can be efficient when I shop. But I don’t tell my friends and family to shop at Meijer.
Trader Joe’s, on the other hand, I am passionate about. And even though their store is 50 minutes away from my house, I tell all of my friends and family members that they need to start driving to shop there if they don’t already.
Brand Passion is a different horizon than Brand Loyalty because the top of the Passion cultivation cycle is all about advocacy and referral not about lifetime value (which is its secondary benefit).
What we at Salt & Wine have repeatedly witnessed in the non-profit space over the past years is the lack of consideration given to Brand Passion versus Brand Loyalty, and how that ultimately harms both the brand and its finances.
When brands think about passion first, it makes them far more opinionated about what they say and do and how they cultivate their supporters.
Snapchat wants to find people who are passionate about Social Media disdain. So they talk about that.
DoorDash wants to find people who are passionate enough about delivery that they are willing to spend serious time cracking a very complex promo code. So they make hard-to-enter contests.
He Gets Us wants to find people who are passionate about wading through hypocrisy to encounter the real Jesus. So they don’t pull their punches.
Pfizer wants to find people who are passionate about the pursuit of scientific advancement and ending cancer once and for all. So they make themselves the rallies.
HERE’S THE SELL:
Lest you think there wasn’t a next step for you, there is.
On Tuesday, March 5th at 1 pm Eastern, my Salt & Wine colleagues and I will be putting on a free 1-hour webinar all about how to understand if your current brand presence and customer/donor cultivation program is creating Brand Passion or not and what you need to do to improve it.
So while you wait for your $7 million ad budget to come in for a Super Bowl commercial of your own, let’s see what we can do about increasing your Brand Passion potential.
Click here for registration details
PS: if the whole idea of Category/Cause design has piqued your interest, hit me up, I can tell you all the things.
BONUS! HONORABLE MENTIONS
In case you thought this article was way too long already, I might as well include a few honorable mentions who deserve a shoutout.
Statefarm
This is probably the ad that most other blogs are going to say was the winner of the Super Bowl ad showdown. And it was great because it was funny and thoughtfully delivered in a way that made the Brand’s key messaging very sticky. Points for increasing brand interest.
NFL Sunday Ticket
This was, IMO, the funniest ad that poked fun at itself in a great way. It was a fun story that was memorable and added to my sense that the NFL was ultimately a warm and welcoming community to be a part of. Points for deepening Brand Passion driving toward the next action. Points for driving sales.
Volkswagen
I have to put this in here because it is exactly what Branding is all about. This great story acknowledges that a brand only exists in the minds of the customers. This heartwarming montage to introduce the next Volkswagen bus says ‘dear customer’ we’ll provide the car, you provide the memories.’ Points for stirring brand passion.
BMW i5
So many ads used celebrities as an endorsement by proximity strategies this year. Hoping people will like the brand because they like the Celebrity. BMW at least chose the celebrity and used their quirks to reinforce the brand — there are a lot of imitations, but only one BMW. Needed more cowbell tho. Points for stirring brand passion.
Google Pixel
Want to sell a new product feature? Do say it, show it. Man, Google nailed the empathy and accessibility story here. Not only do they sell a product feature, but they sell you what Google as a company stands for, and it is meaningful. Points for stirring brand passion.
Poppi — the Future of Soda
This ad is similar to the Snapchat ad except rather than create a new category, Poppi is going after an existing category. It’s a good ad with a decent message but based on the rewatch size of their ad vs other ads, it might be just too crowded of a category for people to even care at this point. Points for increasing brand interest.
