Editor’s note: Brent Snider is president of BrainJuicer North America, New York.
This year’s Super Bowl ads saw a changing of the guard. At BrainJuicer, we tested every single brand ad live – with help from our partners ZappiStore and P2Sample, powered by Fulcrum Exchange – and reported results in real time as the trends unfolded. “Hero’s Journey” from Kia featuring the hilarious Melissa McCarthy as a hapless eco-warrior promoting its hybrid car brand, won the night, gaining our Top 5-star score and becoming the first automotive brand to top our Super Bowl testing rankings. But it wasn’t just a new winner we were excited about – it was confirmation of a big shift in what works emotionally on game night where over 100 million viewers tune in to see what brands will do next.
To understand what that means you need to understand how emotional advertising works. Positive emotion is the primary driver of advertising efficiency. Emotional campaigns based in the System 1 principles of how humans make decisions generate larger business effects and drive long-term brand growth. If you feel more, you buy more. But while happiness is the key to a great ad, there are a lot of different types of happiness. Psychologist Paul Ekman’s theory identifies 12 kinds, each of which can make for very different emotional ads.
Over the last few Super Bowls, the big winners have been uplifting ads – sentimental commercials like Budweiser’s classic ads starring horses and puppies, and like our 2015 winner, McDonalds’ “Paid with Love.” These ads tug at your heartstrings. Some even get sad before they get happy, and the resolution of negative emotion makes the positive hit harder.
But last year we saw more use of humor – amusement being one of the other more effective types of happiness. And this year our Top 10 list is dominated by funny ads – Kia being just one example. Buick, Kings’ Hawaiian, Skittles and Tide all went the comic route and came out 5-star winners. Even Mr. Clean got in on the act, reinventing its distinctive brand asset as a sexy dancer. Outrageous and somewhat awkward? I would say so – but also very funny!
Storytelling - back to humor
The pendulum swing back to humor raises a wider question, though. What does this mean for storytelling at the Super Bowl? Storytelling is a great way to make your ad more emotional and more dynamic. Emotional dynamism – the amount an ad switches between different emotions – helps it get shared and improves its short-term activation effects.
There are several ways to tell stories in a 30-, 60- or 90-second ad. Not all of them mix well with humor. Creating negative emotions early and resolving them positively is a great way to make an inspiring and uplifting ad, but it’s shaky ground for one that’s meant to make you laugh, especially given the time limitations. Aflac tried this with dark humor around a hospital patient and a maniacal nurse. With only 30 seconds there was no time to resolve the negative emotions it conjured and the ad ended up getting a less than stellar 2-star score.
Other brands tried this kind of storytelling, but didn’t manage to pull it off. 84 Lumber generated a lot of talk before the game with an ad explicitly themed around Mexican immigrants setting out for America. But it wasn’t politics that landed their ad with a 1-star rating. It was a failure to conclude the story effectively, leaving a lot of people sad and neutral – the worst emotion you can leave off with. And Budweiser, for years the king of ads that swung from sadness to joy, fell flat with a story about its brand founder’s emotional journey. “Born the Hard Way” was beautifully shot, but left more people feeling neutral, which led to 2 stars. It did have a positive ending, but it was still dark and subdued among a lot of colorful and exciting ads.
If resolving negative emotions wasn’t a winning strategy this year, what kind of storytelling did work? The other way to use stories well is to harness the power of surprise – to turn a situation around or provide a punchline to a joke. Surprise is a potent but short-lived emotion – it will quickly resolve into another feeling, and often that will be happiness. The Mr. Clean ad uses surprise perfectly – first in its set up, as we see Mr. Clean like we’ve never seen him before. And then in its finale, with a double twist around the reveal of what’s really going on. Three big opportunities for laughs in 30 seconds – no wonder it was a 5-star ad.
Let’s also look at Kia’s storytelling strategy. To build humor through familiarity – the classic comedy technique of a running joke – as Melissa McCarthy tries to save whales, trees and rhinos with painful results each time. The joke gets funnier for each scenario which helps build happiness throughout the ad.
It’s a good way to tell a story, and the 5-star results speak for themselves. But there is one disadvantage. When we tested the Kia teaser before the game, it did very poorly. With only 15 seconds to establish the joke, the concept didn’t work so well. This is the danger with storytelling based on repetition – you need time to get it right. It might be that Kia could have used McCarthy in a series of short ads, building emotion over time and turning her character into a distinctive brand asset. But as it is, this is an ad which needs its full length to work.
Looking ahead
If humor continues to dominate Super Bowl advertising over the next few years, we’ll see more kinds of story arcs appear that use it – there’s plenty of room to experiment and score surprise hits. Meanwhile, the negative-to-positive storyline seems to have worn out its welcome, but we expect its absence will be short-lived – it was so effective in driving emotion that it’s sure to make a comeback. The puppies and sob stories will have their day again. But this week, laughter ruled Super Bowl LI!