Table of contents for February 7, 2022 in Adweek

At age 88 and decades past her last high-profile role, Betty White didn’t fit the template of a Super Bowl ad star in 2010. But her Snickers spot that year, “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry,” became an instant classic that helped vault her back into the pop culture limelight—where she remained right up to her death in December at age 99. Adweek caught up with the ad’s copywriter, BBDO New York ecd Peter Kain, to find out how it came together. What made Betty White the right fit? We knew the success of the campaign depended on casting. Betty White fit the obvious casting spec for “playing like a grandma.” But more importantly, she was an accomplished comic actor who would know how to find the humor in channeling…

Tickets to this year’s Super Bowl in Los Angeles will come with commemorative nonfungible token (NFT) collectible versions customized with each seat number. Two cryptocurrency exchanges—Crypto.com and FTX—will air dueling ads during commercial breaks. And at least some brands have discussed the idea of featuring NFT sales as part of their Super Bowl campaigns this year, according to an anonymous agency source, although details of any actual plans remained tightly guarded at the time of writing. Such projects could make NFTs and cryptocurrency a conspicuous presence at the 2022 Super Bowl in the same way Big Games of years past have given technology like dotcom startups and fledgling social media platforms an early spotlight. “This feels like the Super Bowl of the early dot-com era. It’s going to feel like…

It was mid-December 2009. Procter & Gamble had an extra 30 seconds of ad time in Super Bowl 44 and a giant warehouse full of Old Spice body wash that was collecting dust. If I remember correctly, the plan was to sell the lot with the help of a Big Game spot, and then retire the Old Spice brand from the body wash business. As copywriters at Wieden+Kennedy Portland at the time, my creative partner Craig Allen and I only had a couple days to come up with a script. The Old Spice playbook had been clearly established: Use a handsome spokesman speaking directly to the camera. A strategist came to our office and told us that, unlike deodorant, body wash was purchased by women, so we should be speaking…

In July 2021, Josh Glodoveza—also known by his nickname Caru—was named a top talent manager by Business Insider. By November, he was brought on by ecommerce merchandiser Fanjoy as its new vice president of talent. It was a year of rapid growth and success, perhaps standard for a mid-career professional—except Glodoveza is only 18 years old. Hailing from the Philippines capital city of Manila, Glodoveza got his start in esports as a self-taught graphic designer, transforming a devoted following and passion for gaming into a hybrid marketing role with esports organization Sentinels in 2019, assisting with stream coordination, community moderating and talent management. Bugha—one such player Glodoveza represented—won the first annual Fortnite World Cup. Following the event, “it kind of sparked something in me,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Holy…

PepsiCo is going into the 2022 Super Bowl with a strategy of mashing up quite a few household names—and not just Pepsi Halftime Show performers Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar and Dr. Dre. Building on a tactic that was rare until recent years, the beverage and snack giant will be packing multiple brands into an ad. One goal, of course, is to save money, though when done correctly, the approach can also highlight similarities or complementary aspects shared by brands. For example, in this year’s Big Game, rapper Megan Thee Stallion will star in an ad promoting Flamin’ Hot products from two PepsiCo-owned sister brands: Cheetos and Doritos. It’s an approach that worked, both creatively and strategically, when PepsiCo paired Mountain Dew and Doritos in a memorable…

Perish the thought, but for many viewers, the Super Bowl is about more than the ads. With linear TV viewing down, fewer people are seeing them. And when they do, the social chatter is likely to be critical—or worse, neutral. An analysis of online conversations during the last five Big Games by Influential, an AI-powered social data platform backed by IBM Watson, shows that sentiment about Super Bowl commercials is trending down. Positive reactions have fallen from 28% of overall social chatter around the Big Game in 2017 to 15% in 2021, while negative comments have gone from 16% five years ago to 34% last year. Commercials also feature in less of the conversations happening during the Big Game, from 11% in 2017 to a high of 29% in 2020,…

The Super Bowl is built to sell products—including the host cities themselves. Super Bowl 56 host Los Angeles missed an opportunity to hold the Big Game in 2021 due to stadium construction delays, but its understudy in Tampa, Fla., provided a valuable lesson on the event’s worth to a city. Last year’s installment was limited to fewer than 25,000 fans at Raymond James Stadium due to Covid-19, but the Big Game drew 96.4 million viewers across all platforms, 35,000 attendees to the Lowe’s Super Bowl Experience interactive theme park and enough guests to raise the city’s occupancy 92.1% on Super Bowl weekend during a pandemic. “For me, Super Bowls are twofold: the direct impact that you get while the game is going on, the visitation and the spending,” said Santiago…

Online sports gambling has exploded in the U.S. since its legalization in 2018, putting savvy publishers in a position to profit off the $52.7 billion fans wagered on professional athletics in 2021, per data firm Morning Consult Several have generated millions in revenue by signing multiyear partnerships with gambling operators, and many of these arrangements pay a commission for each new gambler the media company delivers. The influx of bettors also acts as a flywheel for publishers’ other products, with gamblers purchasing tickets, merchandise and digital subscriptions. So for publishers like Bleacher Report and Sports Illustrated, which inked multiyear arrangements with DraftKings and U.K. betting company 888, respectively, the Super Bowl represents a pivotal opportunity to attract new gamblers and broadcast their suite of custom offerings. But Bleacher Report and…

Could a creative AI pitch a Super Bowl ad concept as solid as a human? Now you can decide for yourself. Adweek gave a set of fake ad prompts to a group of human creatives with Super Bowl ad experience, then fed the same prompts to our Super Bowl Bot, a content-generating AI we’ve been training on Big Game ad concepts for three years. Guess which of the following pitches were dreamed up by the bot, then check Page 19 to see if you were right. In a Super Bowl ad for oat milk brand Oatly set on the planet Mars … A … astronauts terraform the planet. Removing their helmets in their habitat, we see they’re actually hyper-intelligent milking cows. Unburdened by their previous role on Earth, their day’s…

‘1984’ Client Apple Agency Chiat/Day Year 1984 You can’t talk about influential Super Bowl ads without nodding to Apple’s “1984,” a dystopian announcement of the Macintosh launch. “Like Apple, it changed everything,” says Lee Clow, creative director on the spot. “The impact of 1984 can be measured clearly, even in 2022, by the enduring demand for the media inventory on the Super Bowl,” says Brent Anderson, global CCO for Apple agency TBWA\ Media Arts Lab. “Since then, brands and companies continue to chase the opportunity to use the Super Bowl as a media moment to replicate the unquestionable impact that ‘1984’ had for Apple. ‘1984’ stands the test of time like no other piece of film and communication in our industry.” ‘Monkey’ Client E*Trade Agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners Year…

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