It might seem like old news to talk about the Super Bowl in March, but we “march” to a beat of a different drum often and we like it that way. In case you missed it, the Super Bowl was last month and while there’s always a lot of talk leading up to it (and perhaps a day or two after), the discussion sort of drops off into whatever is new and noteworthy, almost immediately.
I teach a course in creativity for the University of Hawaii system and the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday was the class on “content creation”. I wanted to show the students how varied the responses were in relation to design, content, marketing and intention. So, I thought we’d do an activity to teach them a lesson and it ended up sticking with me too.
I pulled five major news sources to show their take on the best Super Bowl ads of 2023. I reviewed USA Today, EW.com, New York Post, The Today Show and CNN. We watched roughly 40 ads in class and I asked the students to send over their top 3 ads, in order, at the end of class.
What we found was, not just news sources, with their own bias (based on their advertisers and whatnot), but the students responses were drastically different too. I expected the newsrooms to have different opinions on some of the ads, but I was a bit surprised that these five publications had very little, if any, crossover on their top 10 ads of the Super Bowl. What surprised me even more was that 25 students—all living on an island in the Pacific Ocean, attending the same college, in the same field, roughly the same age, had such varied picks. They were just as different as the news sources, with very little overlap on their top three picks.
That was a good teaching moment, for them and for me. You see, it tells us that even with giant (and I mean insanely giant) budgets and all the talent in the world (I won’t even guess how many creatives it took to produce every single Super Bowl ad), people responded differently based on their preferences, realities and other factors that are difficult to measure.
While this can be confusing to clients, I hope it’s also a lesson in knowing your audience. You can’t win everyone over, but you have to figure out the best way to reach your audience, those most likely to purchase your product, believe in your campaign or follow your lead. More specifically, you have to know your audience to be “loved” by them.
For those in creative fields, it’s up to you/us to figure out how to reach our niche, however big or small, because there’s always going to be someone competing against your brand. If you’re ever lucky enough to have the entire country watching, and with seemingly endless resources, I hope you don’t judge your success by the media’s response, I hope you judge it by the success of your consumers reactions.