With Super Bowl 60 officially in the rearview mirror, YouTube has aired the dirty laundry of the advertising world through AdBlitz. The platform ranked the advertisements for the Super Bowl 60 Ad Circus based on the number of people who actually bothered to watch or comment on them between the 1st and 12th of February. And it seems we’ve decided as a collective whole that the height of human achievement is Melissa McCarthy playing the role of telenovela actress in the e.l.f. Cosmetics "Melissa" ad, which garnered 39 million views.
The Salesforce and MrBeast Power Trip
The YouTube blog also gave nods to the usual suspects such as Budweiser and Jeep, but the real story here was Salesforce giving the keys to MrBeast. Instead of the usual ad, they launched a million-dollar puzzle hunt that can only be described as a fever dream, rather than the software sales pitch it’s supposed to be. Clearly, brands have decided to outsource the entire creative team to whoever happens to have over 100 million subscribers on the platform. This is a bold move for the company, which sells enterprise CRM solutions, but when the only thing that matters is attention, it seems the YouTube star with the vault full of money is more effective than the entire boardroom full of suits.
Nostalgia, Creators, and the In-App Circus Theory
So, if you had an overwhelming desire to "buy something vintage" during the course of the game, you can thank Volkswagen and Instacart, who both went with a "grainy" look to make you feel all warm and fuzzy about the good old days. "Evolving Nostalgia" was big this year, as brands tried to distract us from our reality by making us think it was still 1994, while the real magic was happening on the second screen.
UberEats and Remix Culture
Take, for instance, UberEats, who didn't just want you to watch their ad with Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper but wanted you to "remix" their ad within their app using their collection of alternative scenes and celebrity cameos. Well, that's one way to spend $10 million on 30 seconds of airtime, effectively turning what could have been an ordinary TV ad experience into a "choose your own adventure" game that keeps you glued to your phone while your friends are forced to watch you play instead of talking to you.
The Death of the Traditional Commercial
Between Salesforce's puzzle hunt and Uber's interactive content library, it's safe to say that the traditional commercial is dead, replaced by an all-or-nothing scavenger hunt designed to gather your data while you search for that hidden QR code. Brands are no longer selling products; they're selling participation, and we're all too happy to play along if we get a chance to win something or at least see an online version of our favorite celebrity.
The lesson of Super Bowl 60 is that brands have given up pretending to care about subtlety in their attempts to be relevant in a world that changes at the speed of light. It’s a fascinating, if slightly exhausting, look into a world in which every ad is an event and every consumer is an active participant, no matter how they feel about it.
