What the Best Super Bowl Ads All Have in Common

Super Bowls ads cost a staggering $170,00 per second to air.

They’d better be good, then. They’d better be the best. If you want to air a boring infomercial that tells most people it’s time for a bathroom break, go ahead, knock yourself, but if you air it during the Super Bowl, not only will you lose millions of dollars, the people you’re trying to reach are likely to throw things at the TV.
Super Bowl fans expect the ads to be the best. Some people even watch the Super Bowl because of the ads.

They expect to see the best ads all year.

But why are they the best?

Some of them are funny, sure, and others are visually impressive, but we see funny and visually impressive ads all the time on TV that don’t cost $170,000 per second to air.
There’s something else going on here, something all marketers can learn from.
Let’s look at five of them.

First, a Pantene commercial shows masculine football players doing their daughters’ hair. We get see a softer side of these guys for a change. They are human beings before they’re football players. They have wives. They have children. They’re three-dimensional, not one-dimensional.

Next we see a boring guy in a boring beige suit step into his boring beige walk-in closet full of nothing but boring beige suits looking for a pair of boring beige socks. (Is there really anything in his house that isn’t beige?) An intimidating Christopher Walken appears in his closet like a nightmare apparition. Walken finds this guy utterly contemptible, and he cuts him down in the kind of blistering performance that actor is famous for. Then he offers Boring Guy salvation with the new Kia Optima. “It’s like the world’s most exciting pair of socks,” he says, “but it’s a mid-size sedan.” The guy gets behind the wheel and is instantly transformed from boring to Whoah!

T-mobile provides us with a little humor. Rap singer Drake is in front of a camera singing some smooth lyrics for a cell phone music video when three executives suddenly yell, “Cut!” They tell him to add the most annoying and schlocky corporate lines imaginable to his song. Lines like, “Device eligible for upgrade after 24 months,” “Mexico and Canada not included,” and “streaming music will incur data charges.” Drake laughs and says, “those changes don’t ruin the song at all!”

Coke brings us a fight between Marvel Comics’ largest superhero, the Incredible Hulk, and its smallest, the Astonishing Ant Man. Ant Man steals the last can of Coke from Bruce Banner’s fridge, which, natch, enrages Bruce and turns him into the Hulk. So Hulk chases Ant Man through the city and finally wins, only in his gigantic state he can’t get his thumb under the tab to open the can. The more-dexterous Ant Man pries it open for him and they both get a sip.

And finally, we see a depressed elderly man sitting in his living room staring at a blank television set. He’s not eating. His family is worried about him. He’s thinking about the glory days in his youth when he was an astronaut. He walked on the moon. He met the president of the United States. But that was all a long time ago. Today he looks like he’s just waiting to die. His son walks in and says, “Okay, Commander. Come with me.” It’s a genuinely touching moment. His son takes him outside and sits him down in the driver’s seat of a brand-new Audi R8. The astronaut stirs to life again as they zoom along a coastal road beneath a full moon while listening to “Starman” by the late and great David Bowie.

Some of these ads are light while others are serious. Some makes us laugh while others pull at our heart strings. But they all have one thing in common:

They’re all stories.

Some are just character sketches while others have more of a plot, but they’re all stories.

Storytelling is and always has been the most effective way to connect brands to customers. Humans beings have been wired for stories for as long as we have had language.

If you can tell people a story and touch them in some way by making them laugh or—if you’re really good—by making them cry, they won’t forget you. Some of them will share your stories with others.

The numbers don’t lie. Four million people watched the Christopher Walken ad on YouTube in less than a week. Five million watched the Coke ad on YouTube in less than a week. Seven million people watched the astronaut and shampoo ads on YouTube in less than a week.

So get out there and make your mark in this world by telling great stories.