Faced with the challenge of promoting products in a difficult time, some companies referenced the nation’s struggles in their marketing messages, while others went for nostalgia.
Many viewers who avoided Super Bowl gatherings on Sunday had little else to do but actually pay attention to the dozens of commercials during the breaks in the matchup between Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs and Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The ads that were served up during a broadcast expected to draw an audience of 100 million presented starkly different ideas of what type of marketing messages would work in the middle of a long pandemic and after a year of social strife and political upheaval.
Addressing Hard Times
Jeep persuaded Bruce Springsteen to appear in his first commercial ever, a two-minute call for national unity that was scheduled to run in the fourth quarter.
The commercial, available before the game on YouTube, was shot partly at a chapel in Lebanon, Kan. — the geographical midpoint of the contiguous United States. “We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground,” Mr. Springsteen says in the ad.
Until now, the 71-year-old rocker had stubbornly resisted offers to endorse products or allow his songs to be used in commercials, a stance that has set him apart from Bob Dylan and most pop stars of today.
Jeep got the Boss to say yes after a long pursuit. Olivier François, the chief marketing officer for Jeep’s parent company, Stellantis, said he was “naïve” when he first approached Jon Landau, Mr. Springsteen’s longtime manager, a decade ago.
“I wasn’t aware of the one thing that all of America was totally aware of, which is that Bruce Springsteen doesn’t do commercials,” Mr. François said.
He said he would “respectfully pitch” Mr. Landau over “many drinks and dinners” in the following years, knowing that Mr. Springsteen’s participation in an ad was “obviously, a very long shot.”
When Mr. François received the script for an early version of the Super Bowl ad, he sent it to Mr. Landau. Within 24 hours, he had a virtual handshake deal with Mr. Springsteen, who joins Bill Murray, the star of last year’s Super Bowl commercial from the same company, as a Jeep pitchman.
In a statement, Mr. Landau said the Boss had created the ad with his own creative team. “Bruce made the film exactly as he wanted to, with no interference at all from Jeep,” he said.
Companies paid roughly $5.5 million for each 30-second slot this year, an expensive marketing gamble. Mr. François said that, because of the high cost, “the only way to make a return on investment is to make the ad last.”
“If it’s going to be forgotten in a year or so, it probably is not worth the money,” he said.
Lockdown Ads
Some companies dealt directly with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on unemployment and the sense of isolation that goes with the shutdowns of so many workplaces, stores and entertainment venues.
“You may be feeling a little cooped up,” said the narrator of an outdoors-themed ad from Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s. “In these trying times, we need nature more than ever.”
The commercial from the job-search site Indeed, set to the inspirational ballad “Rise Up,” began with homebound people who seem to have merged with their couches and beds. By the end of the 60-second ad, they find themselves ready to rejoin the outside world, knotting neckties or strolling confidently down city streets.
“Any time you’re running a big brand, you want to make sure that whatever you’re asserting has context and meaning, and is not just trying to sell stuff,” said Anton Vincent, the president of M&M’s parent company Mars Wrigley North America. “Now, of course, we are trying to sell stuff. But we have a responsibility with the messaging.”
But many ads, such as a pink-hued fever dream of a commercial for Mountain Dew starring the wrestler John Cena, seemed uninterested in rehashing the pandemic. DoorDash’s commercial felt surreal, not because it featured the actor Daveed Diggs cavorting with Big Bird and a host of other “Sesame Street” characters, but because it showed scenes of mask-less personal contact and indoor dining.
“Most brands did typical Super Bowl ads that could run in any regular year,” said Fernando Pellizzaro, group creative director of the Miami agency DAVID.
The Balm of Nostalgia
Other ads reached back to a time before protective face masks and political rancor. Cadillac invoked the 1990 Tim Burton film “Edward Scissorhands” with Timothée Chalamet in the role of Edgar, the son of the titular character. His mother is played by a star of the original film, Winona Ryder, the Gen X avatar who made a comeback in Netflix’s “Stranger Things.”
“It Wasn’t Me,” the 2000 earworm from the rapper Shaggy, was featured in a Cheetos commercial with Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, the stars of “That ’70s Show,” and Shaggy himself. For Uber Eats, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey reprised their “Wayne’s World” roles from their “Saturday Night Live” sketches and movies from an era when slackers were all the cultural rage.
Bud Light reunited stars from past Super Bowl commercials, including the performers Post Malone and Cedric the Entertainer.
“As we’ve all gone through the pandemic, nostalgia has broken through as something that really gives people a calming effect, a good feeling,” said Andy Goeler, the vice president of marketing for Bud Light.
The longtime ad executive Donny Deutsch, who usually hosts a watch party with as many as 40 people but took in the game this year with a group of six, said that being in the Super Bowl usually ensured a quick jolt of attention. But companies also risk the half-absorbed audience remembering aspects of an ad, but forgetting who produced it.
“The Super Bowl is such a cluttered environment for people taking in ads,” he said. “You can have an effective ad, but it may not register for your brand, especially if the brand awareness going in is not there.”
Production Workarounds
Pandemic filming constraints led many companies to rely on stock footage, voice-overs and remote filming. Those hurdles were largely hidden from view, with many ad makers managing to include location changes and special effects, said Margaret Johnson, the chief creative officer at the ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, which worked on the 2021 Super Bowl commercials from Cheetos, Doritos and others.
Filming constraints meant there were few big crowd scenes, usually a staple of the extravagant ads shown during the big game. Oatly, an oat-milk company, showed its chief executive Toni Petersson standing at a keyboard in the middle of a field.
“Wow! Wow!” he sang. “No cow!”
The commercial grabbed plenty of social-media attention, both good and bad. Immediately after the ad was shown, the Oatly website started offering a T-shirt that said across the front: “I totally hated that Oatly commercial.”
Many other ads featured just one or two characters, “which is the safest thing to do,” said Daniel Lobaton, chief creative officer of Saatchi & Saatchi NY.
Huggies, the diaper company, broadcast a commercial in the second quarter that was novel in its use of remote filming. It included scenes shot on Super Bowl Sunday interspersed with footage that had already been filmed. The ad featured eight infants born since midnight in scenes recorded by willing parents, who were compensated by the company. A team of 25 people working on the commercial hustled to get the commercial ready in time, the company said.
Digital Cameos
In some local markets, a blip of an ad from the message board site Reddit, five seconds in length, captured social media attention. Referring to the company’s role in the GameStop fever that recently enveloped the stock market, the commercial masqueraded briefly as a car ad before giving way to a statement headlined “Wow, This Actually Worked.”
This was an ad designed to deliver its full effect on social media, rather than television, since its printed statement was too long to read in the time it flashed on TV screens. The statement noted, in the wake of its Wall Street disruption, that “one thing we learned from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when they come together around a common idea.” (The statement added that the company had spent “our entire budget on five seconds of airtime.”)
Streaming video companies, which have added subscribers in the millions during the pandemic, were also out in force. CBS, this year’s network host of the big game, promoted Paramount+, as its revised and expanded version of CBS All Access will be called. The network also gave commercial time to “Clarice,” its “Silence of the Lambs” spinoff, and “The Equalizer,” a Queen Latifah show set to make its debut after the game.
Disney+ advertised its coming Marvel shows, and Amazon Prime Video plugged its Eddie Murphy film “Coming 2 America,” a sequel to the 1988 comedy hit “Coming to America.”
Leave it to the film director M. Night Shyamalan to provide a twist. With so many of the game’s commercials centered on, or influenced by, the pandemic, a commercial for his next production hinted at a world in which people may once again gather in enclosed spaces. The ad for his film, “Old” — which looked creepy despite having scenes on a beach in bright sunshine — ended with a gravelly voice-over: “‘Old.’ Only in theaters. This summer.”
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