THINK ABOUT IT: What’s The Most Iconic Super Bowl Advertising?

Iconic (adjective) - worthy of veneration

My last article, "Who Will Win Super Bowl LVIII?" prompted someone to ask me, "What do you consider the most iconic Super Bowl ad and why?".

Interesting question!

However, there are many reasons why something may be worthy of veneration.

Therefore, people, even professionals, will judge an ad as iconic using different criteria.

Some will judge a Super Bowl ad to be iconic based on creativity, whatever that means.

Others will judge it to be the most entertaining one.

Or the ad that one likes the most.

It could even be the ad that is most talked about or most viewed on social media following the game.

But to a professional marketer, these all miss the point of advertising: profitably drive growth.

The Budweiser ads Puppy Love (2014) and Lost Dog (2015) generated incredible buzz. They played on viewers' heartstrings. They're considered by many to be iconic.

But they did not lift sales or market share.

Then there’s Will Ferrell for GM (2021). He's marching on Norway (with two other celebrities) because they sell more EVs per capita than the United States. He's hawking GM EVs that are not available, which the company promises to come in 2025. "GM. We're all in."

The ad is "Hall of Shame" stuff, and I understand that GM is no longer all-in.

I would not consider any Super Bowl ad iconic that is not part of a campaign that profitably increases sales and market share.

Which Super Bowl ads do I believe are iconic? While I do not know the sales and market share impact of all the following, I feel they could be iconic:

• Apple 1984 (1984) put the company on the map, clearly differentiating it from the world of PCs.
• Snickers - Betty White (2010) was part of the successful, long-running campaign “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry," which drove double-digit sales and played worldwide.
• Old Spice – The Man Your Man Can Smell Like (2010) raised a moribund brand that many considered “my father’s” brand into a brand many men use today, including me (but then many of you might consider me to be your father’s or, more likely, your grandfather’s age).

There are other ads I admire for their ability to drive sales (but I don’t have the data for each), such as Coca-Cola: “Hey kid, catch,” featuring Mean Joe Greene (1979), which was the only ad in the "Have a Coke and a Smile" campaign that captured the creative concept of Coke bringing joy to any situation. The campaign was developed to compel consumer purchasing and reunite independent bottlers with the company.

McDonald’s “Jordan versus Bird” (1993) is another worthy of mention as I don't think there's anything Michael Jordan endorsed that didn't ring up sales. The same goes for Larry Bird (particularly in Boston), albeit to a lesser degree, at the time.

Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" ad (1984) differentiated the brand from its top competitors, McDonalds and Burger King.

While it seems so cheesy today, another ad that drove me to purchase the brand is Noxema's "Joe and Farrah" (1973). “Joe” is Joe Namath, star quarterback for the New York Jets Super Bowl champions (Super Bowl III, 1969), and “Farrah” is Farrah Fawcett, one of the most popular women of the time.

The aforementioned were one-offs, and I don't know if they profitably drove incremental sales and market share, so I cannot include them as part of the pantheon of actual iconic Super Bowl ads.

As David Ogilvy stated, “It’s not creative unless it sells.”

No Super Bowl ad is iconic unless it profitably drives incremental sales and market share growth.

I'll go one step further to state that not only is an ad that profitably bolsters sales and market share iconic but so is the marketing and agency team that creates it.

Might we add to what's worth veneration beyond profitably growing sales and market share?

Certainly.

It grows the brand over many years through multiple mediums.

It drives competitors to distraction.

It influences the sales force and external constituencies (e.g., health care practitioners, Payers, the retail trade, distributors, etc.) to support it disproportionately that further drives growth beyond expectations.

Iconic advertising profitably builds the business over years!

THINK ABOUT IT:

• What Super Bowl ads do you believe are iconic?
• What criteria are you using to determine what is iconic?
• What Super Bowl LVIII ads that have been previewed do you believe have the potential to be iconic? What is your thinking?
• What's holding your team back from creating iconic advertising?

MAKE YOUR MARKETING MATTER MORE:

• Create an ad strategy that identifies relevant, meaningful differentiation from your competition.
• Undertake the development of a BIG Campaign Idea that wins customers in profitably growing sales and market share.
• Don’t settle. Make every campaign Super Bowl worthy.

?Please follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/richarddczerniawski/, where I share my perspectives from 51 years of successful worldwide brand marketing experience in my blog THINK ABOUT IT each week.

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Peace and best wishes for making your marketing and messaging matter more,

Richard D. Czerniawski