What Makes a Memorable Super Bowl Commercial
By: Ashley Meeker ’24
The Super Bowl is the largest one-day marketing event in the world. Every year, companies and brands debate whether to market their product or service in the Super Bowl. This choice can be an expensive one for a brand’s marketing team to make. An ad buy can cost $7 million for 30 seconds of commercial time plus creative and production costs that range from $1 to $5 million.
Every year, H. Kirk Bozigian, assistant professor of practice in marketing, invites students in his Principles of Marketing class to step into the shoes of a marketing manager working on a Super Bowl campaign. During the class, he has the students act as marketing agencies, and his students are expected to think and act like marketing managers. One of the main responsibilities of a marketing manager is to prepare advertising budgets, recognize effective advertising messages, and approve the creative elements of an advertisement.
As part of Bozigian’s Super Bowl assignment, his students work in teams to understand what goes into creating an effective commercial for the big game. While marketing managers are not responsible for writing or designing advertisements, they are charged with writing a Creative Brief that guides the efforts of copywriters, producers, and art directors. Marketing managers use creative briefs to instruct designers, producers, and other members of an advertising team on the goals of the advertisement or campaign, the target audience, marketing objectives, etc. Students explored what tips, rules, and best practices make an engaging and effective commercial from articles they found online. They used three commercials from this year’s Super Bowl that demonstrated these concepts.
For this project, Bozigian references Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. This book highlights six important principles to help ideas, ads, and messages “stick” with consumers.
- Simplicity
- Unexpectedness
- Concreteness
- Credibility
- Emotions
- Stories
Bozigian emphasizes to his students that commercials do not need to meet every single one of these principles for their advertisement to work. However, a successful advertisement uses at least one or some combination of these six principles along with what Bozigian feels makes a memorable commercial . . . humor!
Through this class, this assignment models the types of tasks students would encounter in a professional setting. This mock marketing agency model enhances the creativity and engagement of students.
