Advertisers Look For Super Growth In Super Bowl LIX

Fly, Eagles, fly! I normally prefer competitive Super Bowl games, but this Eagles fan was perfectly happy with a massacre this year. And also — there were ads!

Organizations are facing more pressure than ever to deliver profitable growth, and brand budgets are getting squeezed as marketers are being asked to do more with less and prove the returns of practically every penny spent. That makes coughing up $8 million per 30 seconds of media (plus creative production, talent fees, PR, etc.) an even higher-pressure situation for Super Bowl advertisers, who must achieve disproportionate growth from their efforts. So let’s look through the lens of the growth levers that my colleague Dipanjan Chatterjee and I laid out in the report Unlock Your Revenue Growth Potential to see which ads went beyond just making us laugh, cry, or scan a QR code to set up their brand for sustained profitable growth.

If You’re Not Meaningfully Pulling These Growth Levers, Spend Your Budget Elsewhere

• Salience: This is (or should be) the primary goal of every Super Bowl advertiser — to put their brand in the consideration set in a buying context — but of course, some do it better than others. Bud Light created a fun ad that positioned it as the beer of choice for suburban barbecue occasions. By comparison, Michelob ULTRA broke out the pickleball paddles to cement ULTRA as perfect for a post-workout celebration. Lay’s surprised me when it went for a moving ad about its local potato sourcing, but I imagine that it created more affinity for when consumers will inevitably cross a display in the grocery store.
• Access: poppi aired a colorful 60-second ad that seems very in line with its brand aesthetic, positioning it as an evolution of soda. But the content of the story was telling: The ad showed poppi as an option on restaurant menus where you would typically find soda, hinting at an ambitious distribution channel strategy. Cirkul likely leveraged its ad buy to have very strong in-store presence in the country’s largest retail chain, which boosts its chances of a strong return on Super Bowl spend.
• Price: Highlighting value can be a smart strategy in a time of perceived economic headwinds, and I’m surprised that it wasn’t more at the forefront (maybe Temu spent its entire decade’s budget during last year’s game). DoorDash, for one, highlighted the savings from its DashPass product and how it can lead to spending on other “luxuries.”

• Product: The biggest tearjerker of the night in our household was the Google Pixel ad that highlighted how its Gemini AI platform could be relevant in very real-life situations. Bosch and Jeep, in very different ways, highlighted their product portfolios with hopes of expanding consumers’ perceptions of how their brands could fit into their lives.
• Experience: Making it easy and enjoyable for customers to use your product or service should be a cost of entry but can be wielded as a growth lever, as well. T-Mobile aimed to lure new customers by highlighting the investments that it made in frictionless, consistent cell service, addressing one of the key drivers of people switching carriers. Meta and Ray-Ban hoped to wow with a dramatized experience of using their AI-powered glasses.

Growth should always be the goal, and that means strategically thinking through the consumer base from which you want to source that growth, along with the levers that you’ll need to pull to win and retain those consumers. Feel free to reach out to me and my colleagues at Forrester as objective thinking partners as you pursue super growth (and go, birds).