The Super Bowl of Advertising: How the Commercials Won the Game

The respective histories of the National Football League and the advertising industry are intertwined by the advent of television, a medium that gave consumers visual information and entertainment without leaving their living rooms. The TV was a great leap forward for mass consumption and acted a 20th century equivalent to a campfire where stories were told and experiences were shared. Advertisers identified this medium almost immediately and saw the potential of appealing to consumer’s emotions. Given that pro football owes its popularity to television with the definitive 1958 Championship Game, advertising during a football game was match made in P.T. Barnum’s heaven. 

Flash forward to 2022, and this game we call the Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event in America. In 2020-2021, 96 million people tuned in to watch the “Big Game”, and though the ratings were down roughly 6 million viewers from the year prior, many, if not most entertainment programs on television would sell their souls for those kind of viewership numbers.

Not everyone who watches the game, however, would consider themselves football fans. Of course, most of the Super Bowl’s audience are the NFL’s true believers, the ones who wouldn’t miss a Sunday game under any circumstances. But there are those who watch for pageantry, the tradition and the comradery, which makes the big game a sort of unofficial holiday that is only second to Thanksgiving in food consumption. Some watch only to see the halftime show, which at this rate has become a concert in and of itself.

Finally, but for many, most importantly, there are those who watch the Super Bowl purely for the advertisements, a series of :30 second commercials that cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars to secure airtime and produce a concise story to persuade the viewer to choose their brand over their ample competition.

Despite the influence and hub bub of Super bowl commercials, however, there’s little analysis or literature written about this profitable sector of professional football. Bernice Kanner’s book, The Super Bowl of Advertising: How the Commercials Won The Game, is one of these few explorations into the world of Super Bowl ads.

Published in 2004, Kanner’s book isn’t so much definitive history on the evolution of Super Bowls ads, as much as it is an observation of industry trends and techniques that companies utilized sell nationwide audience on their product, as well as a reflection on the advertisement’s success or failure.

For instance, after Kanner provides an introductory chapter that explains the reasoning why advertisers are so high on the Super Bowl (“it’s the one time of year when football fanatics and the sports-challenged commingle in relative peace”) and some of their approaches (humorous commercials stand out because it offers a break from the tension and suspense of the game),  Kanner discusses some of the early successful campaigns, most notably Coca Cola’s “I’d Like to Teach The World to Sing” to promote Coke as a social catalyst among strangers. Coca Cola doubled down on pulling America’s heartstrings when they followed up with the “Have a Coke and a Smile” campaign that featured a young football fan giving his soft drink to an exhausted and battered Mean Joe Greene.

As Kanner notes, these commercials resonated with audiences, but the game changer for advertisers came in 1984, when Apple aired its Avant Garde “1984” commercial that “transformed the Super Bowl into an advertising showcase” by utilizing the antiestablishment beliefs of America’s youth to sell their Macintosh Computer. Apple’s ingenuity would crumble a year later, Kanner points out, when Apple’s follow up ad “Lemmings” isolated traditional business computer buyers, driving sales downward and leading to the termination of Steve Jobs and the ad agency he hired.

In the post 1984 Super Bowl advertising world, brands across all industries reached above and beyond what was expected. Airtime reached over half a million dollars by the mid-eighties, gradually increasing to 2.3 million by the time the book was published (currently selling for 6.5 million for the upcoming Super Bowl).

Kanner goes on to chronicle Super Bowls commercials across different industries (apparel, beverages, automobiles, financial services and food product), creating this unofficial yearbook for advertisers and fans that saw these commercials in real time.

For instance, she documents the evolution of certain companies’ marketing strategies, such as Budweiser’s use of dogs and animated frogs in their commercials during the 80s and 90s, before they pivoted their approach for fear that the use of animals would appeal to underaged children than adults.  Budweiser’s adjustments to balance their ads were almost seamless, as they wowed viewers with their famous “Bud Bowl I” advertisement in ’89 and it’s Mr. Insincerity “I Love You Man” campaign.

Kanner also uses these industrial promotions to pinpoint marketing strategies that came of age during the Super Bowl, such as Nike’s decision to use Michael Jordan in their ads, most notably in their 90 second, documentary style commercial “Revolution” that used the original Beatles recording “Revolution” in 1987 (though audiences ripped Nike’s use of the song as misappropriation, and Capitol Record subsequently sued for $15 Million).

Once Nike signed Jordan, sports footwear companies soon joined the trend, as L.A. Gear signed Karl Malone, Reebok signed Boomer Esiason, and the table for athlete-apparel endorsements had been set. Nike’s greatest accomplishment in the Super Bowl ads came with the “Bo Knows” series that featured Los Angeles Raiders running back Bo Jackson competing in various sports.

Companies outside of sports began to take a page out of Nike’s playbook, as Pepsi would hire pay Cindy Crawford to appear in their commercials starting in 1991 (though, Kanner notes that using celebrities is risky because they can draw attention away from the product they are promoting).

Given the 2004 publication, Kanner also provides a trip down memory lane to the “dotcom bowl,” better known as Super Bowl XXXII, where Tennessee Titan’s wide receiver Kevin Dyson was tackled one yard short of the goal line by St. Louis Rams linebacker Mike Jones in a 23-16 Rams victory. Seventeen of the thirty six advertisers were internet startups that “threw away money on the Super Bowl even faster than investors had thrown money on them,” all with the hopes of replicating Apple’s 1984 success.

They money, however, was not well spent, as much of audiences didn’t quite understand what the sites were promoting in their commercials, such as OnMoney.com’s “Night of the Living Paper Ad” that or OurBeginning.com’s “Angry Brides” commercial. Not all internet commercial suffered the same fate though. Companies like E*Trade didn’t perform horribly but later dropped the “.com” from their promotions. AutoTrader.com replicated a scene from The Matrix to promote it’s service, while Charles Schwab had a well-received commercial starring former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr talking “financialese” with former Chicago Bears head coach Mike Ditka.

By the book’s end, the readers may feel like the book was simply a series of elongated description of various commercials for people who hadn’t seen them before as opposed to an analysis of why these agencies marketed their client’s product the way they did. Additionally, the book could have done a better job of examining Super Bowl commercials from the NFL’s point of view (though it’s possible their involvement is secondary compared to the network that carries the game).

However, The Super Bowl of Advertising shows Kanner’s passion for the subject and gives us a glimpse of her expertise in the advertising industry. Kanner, a journalist for publications such as Ad Age and New York Magazine, passed away in 2006, writing extensively about advertising in her columns and book that gained respect amongst the people and companies she wrote about.  If she were alive today, it would be interesting to read her insights as to how Super Bowl advertising has evolved to include social media, fantasy football, sports betting and the rise of social justice messaging in commercials.

All things considered; this is an important book because it stands alone as an entry into the Super Bowl advertising world. As expensive and profitable as the game is for it’s advertisers, it’s surprising that nothing else has been written in this field. But thanks to the late Kanner’s efforts, we at least have something to look back on that tells the tale of the ads placed in between the Game’s commercial breaks, because in a sentimental world like advertising, what better than taking a trip down memory lane?