With the next Super Bowl just around the corner, fans and brands alike are getting ready for the year’s most exciting evening of TV spots. At the center of all the hype sits the coveted Super Bowl TV ads — those high-stakes moments of creative ingenuity that mix marketing mastery with consumer engagement. With millions at stake and often less than 30 seconds to get it right, advertisers need to be as strategic and precise as the players on the field.
To help marketers prepare for the bright lights of the Big Game, EDO, the TV outcomes company, teamed up with Vidmob, the leading creative data company, to combine our expertise for deeper insights into the creative choices that drive results on TV advertising’s biggest night. While celebrities have long been proven winners at the Super Bowl, we decided to exclude them from the analysis so we could find out which other creative elements are most successful when it comes to generating consumer engagement.
Since 2015, EDO has scored every Super Bowl ad on its predictive impact on business outcomes, measuring increases in consumer engagement for a brand or product in the minutes immediately following a TV ad. Vidmob then used its AI-powered analytics platform to extrapolate creative data from the TV spots that ran during the 2022 and 2023 Super Bowls —- totaling 176 Big Game ads — to pinpoint creative elements correlated with higher performance.
For this Big Game analysis, network promo spots, as well as pre- and post-game ads were excluded. Combining EDO’s powerful dataset and VidMob’s analysis, five creative insights for top-performing Super Bowl advertising were uncovered.
Here’s a taste of how brands like T-Mobile, Salesforce, Skechers, and Toyota have won on TV advertising’s biggest stage:
Nostalgia gets the goods: Ads featuring nostalgia generated 35% more engagement on a per-person, per-second basis than the median Super Bowl ad — T-Mobile’s 2023 Grease tribute was 4.4x more engaging than the median ad at that year’s Big Game.
Impressive vistas inspire engagement: Aerial views and astronomy were proven winners, generating 125% more engagement than the median Super Bowl ad, like Salesforce’s space odyssey with Matthew McConaughey, drove 4.8x more engagement than the median ad at 2022’s Big Game.
Motion moves us, outdoors leads to outcomes: Ads featuring different modes of transport drove an engagement lift of 80%. Creatives that included scenes shot in nature were 59% more likely to drive consumer engagement than the median ad.
Bold claims, big engagement: Ads that made declarative statements about a brand, product, or benefit delivered a 33% engagement lift above the median Super Bowl ad. Online retailer Temu’s Big Game debut encouraged folks to “shop like a billionaire” and was a top performer in 2023, driving 10.2x greater engagement than the median Super Bowl ad that year.
No Super Bowl playbook is complete without actionable creative analysis
The Super Bowl is the ultimate proving ground for brand advertisers wanting to showcase their creative chops. For those that are willing to play, the challenges are great, but the rewards can be greater. Investment in the Big Game offers unparalleled reach and the rare opportunity for advertising creative to engage a massive, captive, and diverse audience.
But the only way to seize that opportunity is by making smart, data-driven creative decisions that deliver the outcomes that are most predictive of business results.
To learn more about the latest research in Super Bowl creative effectiveness, join us in Las Vegas for Adweek’s Big Game CMO Brunch on Friday, February 9, where EDO and VidMob will unpack more of these trends, and we’ll hear more of the art and science of creativity from EDO co-founder and filmmaker Edward Norton.