Earnest, inspirational messages with a dash of easy humor won the night during the ad breaks of Super Bowl LIX.
Monday morning quarterbacks may not have been overwhelmed by this year’s crop of ads, to go by the comments on social media, but testing by research company System1 found the spots largely connected with consumers, especially when they focused on telling a good story and avoided edgy humor.
“The ads were a step up from last year,” said Vanessa Chin, SVP of Marketing at System1. A number of ads scoring five stars—a feat that did not happen in 2024—helped push the average score for all the ads tested to three stars, up from 2.7 in Super Bowl LVIII. System1 asks survey respondents how they feel before and after seeing an ad, and how they feel about the brand, along with what they remember about the brand and its message, to establish a “fluency” score that quantifies how well viewers recall the brands.
“I think it’s safe to say that most advertisers this year wanted to avoid controversy,” said Chin. “But the way they did that wasn’t to do bland, out there ads, it was to take out older playbooks for effectiveness and return to tactics like sincere storytelling and humor that was silly, not edgy.” Chin noted spots such as Haagen-Dazs’s spoof of The Fast and the Furious action franchise and Little Caesars’s take on Schitt’s Creek star Eugene Levy’s notable eyebrows were “goofy but not boring” and even the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism’s ad featuring rapper Snoop Dogg and retired quarterback Tom Brady showed a social message could be stirring and effective.
The three five-star ads moved up the average and demonstrated three approaches that do well in the Super Bowl, said Chin: heartfelt storytelling in Lay’s potato chip ad praising family farms, goofy humor in WeatherTech’s spot featuring senior women on a wild road trip and inspirational and uplifting messaging in the NFL’s spot.
“A lot of this year’s humor fell flat because it was more edgy or surreal than funny,” said Chin. Those ads performed well on metrics such as brand recognition or short-term recall, but failed to drive positive emotions that support long-term brand-building potential, she said. But when humor landed, it worked well, she added. Besides Little Caesars, Haagen-Dazs and WeatherTech, she noted that Doritos’ return to their “Crash the Superbowl” fan-made ad also landed in System1’s Top 10.
Sincerity also “made a big comeback this year” said Chin, noting earnest messages scored strongly, including Lay’s ad and a spot from drugmaker Pfizer about a childhood cancer patient set to rapper LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.” Additionally, two of the NFL’s purpose-driven ads also made the Top 10, said Chin.
“That’s a great example of how you don’t have to be divisive or controversial to avoid dullness, often you just have to zig where your category is zagging,” said Chin. “The swaggering ad with an LL Cool J soundtrack is so different from the usual soundtrack you might expect in a cancer care ad that it sparked a whole span of emotions and very little neutrality.”
This was the first year System1 has tested Super Bowl ads for neutrality, essentially the lack of impact on the viewer, something System1 has zeroed in as a problem area for advertisers.
Mascots, not celebrities
Fluency held up well this year, said Chin, especially when brands focused on distinctive and well-loved brand assets. She singled out the return of the Budweiser Clydesdales, a humorous ad for the soft drink Poppi, Red Bull’s use of its long-running “gives you wings” slogan and Pringles chips’ spot featuring a flying mustache—”a really fresh use of a familiar asset,” she said.
“Returning mascots and creative consistency pay off, but too often brands seem nervous of using them and reach for novelty instead. Budweiser shows why sticking with what works is often the best route,” said Chin. The brand has a long history with the Super Bowl.
Brand mascots were not on wide display at the Super Bowl, but “People like those mascots!” said Chin. She noted Instacart took a risk with a spot packed with brand mascots for all the grocery brands it delivers and it paid off with a four-star score, as well as high brand fluency, which shows viewers recognized the advertiser, as well.
While mascots were effective, celebrities were less so, in spite of the number of ads that featured an accumulation of celebrities. Spots using one celebrity spokesperson—such as Jeep’s spot featuring Harrison Ford—were rare, with brands such as Dunkin’ and Michelob ULTRA packing the stars.
The key is in the execution, said Chin. “Maybe the most notable trend this year was the strong performance of ads with no celebrities at all, like Lay’s and WeatherTech,” she said. “A good story will usually beat an expensive celebrity.”
