Predictions for Super Bowl LIX ads

For this week’s AdMiration feature, we’re taking a break from our regular celebration of individual ads to kick off our Super Bowl coverage.

Similar to last year, brands are dropping teaser after teaser to give us hints on what direction their ads will take. Based on what I’ve seen so far, here are my four predictions for what I think we’ll see from brands at this year’s big game.

It seems like each year, Super Bowl ads need to be weirder and bigger to top the previous years. And that makes sense. We're all looking for the ads to entertain us as much as the game. We want to talk about them the next day at work, and it’s the ones that stand out that give us the best talking points. 

Super Bowl advertisers tend to be very good at creating something distinctive. 

But historically one thing they aren’t as good at is tying this distinctiveness into something that fits with the brand being advertised. They’re great at making stories we want to talk about the next day, but can we always remember which brand the ad was for?

Some ads will do this well, leveraging their existing brand assets and giving their brands or products a key role in the story, but others will lose their brands entirely to the spectacle. 

One brand that has successfully used existing brand assets in the Super Bowl year after year is Snickers. Having originally launched “You’re not you when you’re hungry” in the Super Bowl with Betty White, Snickers successfully leveraged the long-running campaign in 2016 with this ad featuring Willem Dafoe as a grumpy Marilyn Monroe. 

The consistency over time, combined with a funny and unexpected situation that grabbed attention, gave this ad high scores for sales and brand impact — scoring in line with the original Betty White ad! 

In 2023 we saw some of the best performing ads zigged when everyone else zagged by tapping into more “love.” They told smaller stories, often without any celebrities or spectacle, that made people really feel something. While everyone else was focused on making us laugh, they were creating a deeper emotion.

This ad from The Farmer’s Dog — that focused on a girl’s relationship with her dog over the years — was our surprise winner that year. If every ad is over the top, the more grounded ads can stand out a bit more. 

Another great example is Anheuser-Busch’s “Let’s grab a beer” from 2021. 

This ad featured a great insight, exploring the emotions involved in telling someone “let’s grab a beer.” When you share a beer, it’s not just about the beverage. It’s about consoling someone who just lost a job, commiserating over a delayed flight, making up after a fight, etc. The branding on this one could have been a bit clearer, but the emotion was certainly there!

We didn’t see the same shift to love-based ads in 2024, so I don’t expect to see what we saw in 2023 again this year. But there may be one or two that come out and surprise us.

Each year we see more and more celebrities in Super Bowl ads. Featuring just a single celebrity feels like table stakes, now brands include multiple celebrities, sometimes completely unrelated to each other. 

Sometimes this can be done very successfully, other times the celebrities end up dominating the ad and the brand gets lost. 

Last year we saw T-Mobile successfully use several celebrities in “That T-Mobile Home Internet Feeling.” T-Mobile brought back Zach Braff and Donald Faison from its ad the year before (known for their time together on “Scrubs”) to welcome Jason Momoa to the neighborhood with a fun song about home WiFi. The celebrities make the ad fun and memorable, but the product is still the star of the show, resulting in a high brand impact for the ad. 

Another favorite Super Bowl ad of mine is Tide’s “It’s a Tide ad” from 2018. 

This one effectively uses David Harbour (at the peak of Stranger Things’ popularity) by putting him in a number of cliched advertising scenarios. During each scenario he states “it’s a Tide ad” — not the ad you may have expected — because in each scenario all the clothes are so clean. By mentioning the brand repeatedly and giving it a role in a number of quick, surprising and engaging scenes, this ad was highly successful. 

I say this year after year but it remains true, celebrities are not brand assets — unless you’ve invested a lot of time in using them again and again (while no other brand does). 

They aren’t going to cue the brand in the same way a brand mascot like the GEIKO gecko or Tony the Tiger can. Their power can be harnessed for the brand, but it has to be done very intentionally — ensuring that the brand and/or product has a key role to play in the ad.

I suspect we’ll see that not every Super Bowl ads does this successfully. 

Nostalgia has been big in Super Bowl ads in past years, but it’s more than that. There’s a lot of pressure on Super Bowl ads, so it makes sense to bring back successful elements from past years.

Doritos is bringing back its Crash the Super Bowl competition after a nearly decade-long hiatus. Doritos ran Crash the Super Bowl eight times starting in 2006 where it allowed consumers to create their own Super Bowl ad and the audience voted for the winner that would air during the big game. We saw a lot of fun ads come out of that competition, some of which were very successful ads for the Doritos brand. 

One of my favorites is “Goat 4 Sale” from the 2013 Super Bowl, which features a man buying a goat who does nothing but munch on Doritos all day and all night. The ad prominently features the Doritos product — including a hilarious scream from the goat when it realized the Doritos were missing — that resulted in an engaging and successful ad. It’s a great example of an ad heroing the brand. The story doesn’t make any sense without the delicious Doritos!

Budweiser is also teasing Clydesdales as part of its Super Bowl ad this year, so Doritos won’t be the only brand bringing back something successful from the past!

What do you think we’ll see from brands at this year’s Super Bowl? Do you agree with my predictions? Let us know by interacting with our coverage on LinkedIn.

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