HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business.
The Super Bowl isn’t just American football’s championship game. It’s also one of the world’s biggest stages for brand messaging.
In 2024, the average 30-second Super Bowl ad cost 7 million dollars. And that doesn’t even include the production costs. But how do brand managers know if they’re getting a good return on that huge investment?
Today, we bring you a conversation about the evolution of corporate branding with Bentley University assistant professor of marketing Shelle Santana. Using lessons from classic Super Bowl ads – like Budweiser’s iconic Clydesdale horses – you’ll learn how to choose the best, measurable goal for an ad campaign and account for the risks that can accompany bold storytelling –like controversy or online backlash.
This episode originally aired on Cold Call in August 2019. Here it is.
BRIAN KENNY: “This flat tire needs a man,” says the narrator of the Goodyear Tire commercial that aired during the inaugural Super Bowl between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs in 1967. The ad featured a damsel in distress with a blown tire on a dark and lonely stretch of road. He goes on to say, “When there’s no man around, Goodyear should be.” That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that advertisers took a chauvinistic tone for spots appearing on a game that was expected to be watched mostly by men. With brands like Ford, Chrysler, Muriel Cigars, and Budweiser, it was an advertising bro fest, but also a reflection of the cultural norms of the time. After all, the 1960s was the dawn of the golden age of advertising when agencies were evolving from product pitchers to storytellers. That first Super Bowl was broadcast on not one, but two major networks, capturing an audience of 56 million viewers. A 60 second spot cost $85,000. Advertisers were hooked from the start. Fast forward to 2019 and the Super Bowl is still one of the most watched events at major network television, but now, women make up almost half of the hundred million viewers. Thankfully, the chauvinism has been dialed back, a clear indicator that brand storytelling has evolved with the times. At a cost of over $5 million for a 30 second spot, the competition between the advertisers is every bit as intense as the play on the field. Today, we’ll hear from professor Shelle Santana about her case entitled, “Super Bowl Storytelling.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call, recorded live at the 2019 Evanta CMO Executive Summit.
BRIAN KENNY: Shelle Santana is an expert in consumer behavior, particularly in relation to spending and credit. Before embarking on her academic career, she was a marketing executive at American Express. Shelle, thanks for joining me today.
SHELLE SANTANA: Thanks for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: We’re not alone, are we?
SHELLE SANTANA: No, we’re not. We have a very…
BRIAN KENNY: We are…
SHELLE SANTANA: … full room in front of us.
BRIAN KENNY: … sitting in front of a lot of people. Folks, make some noise so people know that you’re out there. All right. I will let you know that you’re listening in on the 100th episode of Cold Call, so we’re excited to be here today to share this with you. We’re going to engage you in the conversation as we move along here, but Shelle, I’ll start like I always do. Can you just tell me, what prompted you to write this case?
SHELLE SANTANA: I was teaching a course on branding this year, and we were going to do a module on brand storytelling. I thought the Super Bowl is such a unique opportunity to explore, and examine, and observe the range of storytelling devices and the range of storytelling features that brands use in this one moment and in this one platform. So, that was one reason. The second reason is that it’s such a significant cultural, economic, social, commercial enterprise, the Super Bowl, that I wanted to take advantage of it being the day before one of our main classes, and so we can sort of carry the social significance from Sunday into our classroom on Monday and just talk about the ads as consumers, but also turning the tables and examining them as brand managers, and so examining, what is the effectiveness of these ads? What was the story that the brand was trying to tell? When you look at the ads across the entire programming, and there’s 85 to 90 ads that are aired during the Super Bowl, which people actually watch, you begin to see the themes coalesce around a few different ideas. Those ideas tend to reflect what’s animating and motivating culture at any particular point in time, and that’s kind of an “aha” moment for the students to see.
BRIAN KENNY: Are they a little tired the day after the Super Bowl, the students?
SHELLE SANTANA: They’re very tired the day after the Super Bowl, and they’re very… We’ll talk about some of the statistics, but I’m very lucky that our students tend to come to class, even when they are very tired. Many, many people, about 16 million people actually call in sick to work the day after the Super Bowl, and there are some HR executives that are lobbying to actually have the day after the Super Bowl just be a holiday because…
BRIAN KENNY: Yes, I’m in favor of that…
SHELLE SANTANA: … the productivity is just rock bottom.
BRIAN KENNY: … because the New England Patriots, apparently, are going to be in the Super Bowl every year.
SHELLE SANTANA: An entire generation of people have grown up with the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.
BRIAN KENNY: Yes. It’s a wonderful thing.
SHELLE SANTANA: Yes.
BRIAN KENNY: So, apparently, TV advertising is still a big deal.
SHELLE SANTANA: It is.
BRIAN KENNY: How many minutes of advertising in a one-hour program?
SHELLE SANTANA: Typically, a one hour television program has about 13 minutes of advertising on it. The Super Bowl, in contrast, which is almost a four hour spectacle, has 46 minutes of advertising on it. So, a typical one hour program has about 17 ads. The Super Bowl has between 85 and 90 ads, and people actually watch the ads, which is what’s even more exciting. For the other 364 days a year, consumers go out of their way to avoid commercials. The Super Bowl is the one day of the year where people go out of their way to watch the commercials, so that’s kind of fun.
BRIAN KENNY: The case gets into some data about how much brands are spending on advertising, generally speaking. I mean, what does that number look like?
SHELLE SANTANA: In general, brands tend to spend about $224 billion in advertising across all different platforms, and television is about 35% of that, so about 78 billion. The Super Bowl, in and of itself, is a $420 million expenditure on just that one day, and that’s just for the ad time. That’s not the ad production.
BRIAN KENNY: Right, that’s another additional millions of dollars…
SHELLE SANTANA: Exactly.
BRIAN KENNY: … depending on what you produce. So, how has streaming affected the advertising industry? I think we’ve heard over and over again, advertising is going to die. The advertising that we know today is going away, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
SHELLE SANTANA: It’s not, but it is definitely changing. Streaming is one of the things that has fundamentally affected advertising and how brands speak to consumers. By that, I mean when we were living in a strictly analog world, we all had to, let’s face it, endure some commercials. Sure, we might go and get a snack, or go to the bathroom, or talk to a friend, but we weren’t even passively absorbing some of the messages that were being broadcast over networks. Now, with streaming, you can bypass ads all together, and you can sort of pay to not even be exposed to any of the ads. Brands have had to get much more clever on how they’re going to reach consumers. What you see a lot of times now is these, almost like, micro ads, these 5 and 10 second promotional spots just to get some awareness out there for these entirely digital consumers that are out there, like my sons who have no use for anything larger than a cell phone in front of them.
BRIAN KENNY: Why don’t we dive into the Super Bowl, itself? There are some great statistics in the case about food consumption and things like that on Super Bowl Sunday. Can you describe some of that?
SHELLE SANTANA: I was talking about the cultural significance of the Super Bowl, and I will say that I am a huge NFL fan, so it was also fun for me to just write a case about the Super Bowl, but the Super Bowl is the largest… We consume more food on the Super Bowl, as Americans, than any other day of the year, other than Thanksgiving. We consume, literally, millions of pounds of potato chips and avocados.
BRIAN KENNY: I only eat one million pounds of potato chips on Super Bowl Sunday.
SHELLE SANTANA: Billions of chicken wings, tens of millions of cases of beer are sold on Super Bowl Sunday, and not surprisingly then, the day after the Super Bowl, the sales of antacids are higher by about 20%. 16 million people call in sick to work, and you can see across these different categories, the week leading up to Super Bowl, there’s a Super Bowl lift in categories like condiments, dips, processed cheese. You see the Super Bowl effects sort of trickling through the entire economy. So, it’s not just a day about football. It’s a day about consumption.
BRIAN KENNY: The great American tradition of consumption.
SHELLE SANTANA: Exactly.
BRIAN KENNY: Awesome. When did the ads start to become kind of their own phenomenon? I mean, I teased the opening with the Goodyear ad, and there were lots of advertisers in that first Super Bowl, but at some point, we must’ve turned a corner where the ads became part of the story.
SHELLE SANTANA: A lot of people point to Apple’s 1984 ad, which aired, not surprisingly, on the 1984 Super Bowl when they announced the launch of the Macintosh personal computer.
BRIAN KENNY: Great ad, yeah.
SHELLE SANTANA: That is still in the advertising Hall of Fame. It’s, a lot of people will point to, the best ad ever. It was directed by Ridley Scott, who is a well-known film producer and director. It was really the first time that this really compelling story was told in anticipation of a product launch, and that became sort of the benchmark going forward for must-see TV and what brand storytelling could look like on this phenomenal platform when you’ve got one out of every three Americans in the country engaged and watching.
BRIAN KENNY: Yes, and they’re paying close attention. I mean, people are like getting back to the TV to see the ad and then leaving during the game, sometimes.
SHELLE SANTANA: Exactly, exactly.
BRIAN KENNY: So, does that mean the stakes are a lot higher for brands that are featuring an ad in the Super Bowl?
SHELLE SANTANA: I would say the stakes are higher because it costs so much money, like a $5 million 30 second spot is a lot of money. So, there’s a lot of scrutiny around, what are you getting for that $5 million? One of the things I did with my students this year was, I actually ran a mini ad meter just for my class. What brands are doing a lot of times now, which I think is really interesting, is it used to be that you kept your ads under a lock and key until the Super Bowl. Nobody wanted anyone to see their ad before airing live on the game. Now, about half of the ads are released in advance, and so we did a mini ad meter, which is what the USA Today runs every year. For about half of the ads that had been released, I asked half my students to evaluate just how much do you like this ad, so they got to watch it as consumers. The other half of my students, I asked them, how many more sales is this ad going to generate? Then we look at those results in the class, in real time, and the list of ads are almost never the same. They don’t match up, and that’s a big “aha” moment for students to think about, well, what is the purpose of this ad? So going back to your question of, are the stakes higher, I think what the cost of the Super Bowl does is it really forces brand managers to think about, what do I want to get out of this? And how do I measure the success of it? Do I want brand awareness? Do I want to drive sales? Do I want to drive conversation on social media? Those are all worthy goals, but they’re very different metrics, and you need to be very clear on what you’re actually trying to accomplish.
BRIAN KENNY: What do you think about the strategy of kind of leaking them out? I mean, I could imagine that you want to build up suspense, so you want to have that “aha” moment when the ad comes on and nobody has seen it or has a sense for it, but I do remember in the last couple of years, it’s like everybody was putting their ads out beforehand, and it felt to me like it was sort of anti-climactic at the game.
SHELLE SANTANA: There are some ads that don’t get released beforehand, and those tend to be the ones that are around halftime, like big moments, the last ad before halftime, the first ad when halftime is over, and sort of the fourth quarter ads. Those tend to be held just for the Super Bowl. So, that’s pretty interesting, but the clever thing I think about releasing the ads in advance is, you begin to engage consumers earlier, and then when you wrap that around a social media strategy, you can begin to drive conversation about your brand before, during, and after the airing of the Super Bowl. That’s another way that you can sort of extend and expand your ROI on the investment. It’s not just about that 30 seconds that’s on network programming. It’s really about the conversation that you’re driving in advance and after the Super Bowl.
BRIAN KENNY: Which, obviously, continues to drive the cost up. So, now we’re not just talking about advertising. We’re talking about the incremental expense of, oh, I got to build a social media campaign around this. I’ve got to engage my customers through word of mouth. What does that look like to a CMO as they’re trying to figure out how to sort through those kinds of decisions?
SHELLE SANTANA: It definitely can drive your costs up, but the amplification opportunity on social media is significant, right? If you just think about 100 million people watching the Super Bowl, which is what typically, the last few years, over a hundred million people have watched it. If you can get another hundred million people posting on Facebook, that’s really powerful and that’s very compelling. So, the reach that social media platforms have, in addition to the network television programming and the airing of the Super Bowl, itself, is a real winner. That’s a great combination.
BRIAN KENNY: What about one of those trolls on the internet? I don’t know if you’ve heard about them, but they’re the people who kind of lurk around and are looking for any opportunity to say something negative. I’ll probably get a bunch of troll comments on this podcast once we post it because I’ve just called them out a little bit, but do brands risk backlash? People know they’re spending millions just to have the time, and then they’re spending millions more for the commercial. As a consumer, do I look at that and say, “Well, that’s kind of a terrible way to spend my money. Why would I buy your product?”
SHELLE SANTANA: I think brands risk backlash all the time. It’s not unique to the Super Bowl. Particularly once you enter the social space, you kind of relinquish a lot of power around what is said about your brand for better or for worse. I think today’s CMOs and brand managers are very savvy about that, and it’s not just brands. It’s also… This year, there was actually a lot of controversy around who would be performing on the Super Bowl halftime show.
BRIAN KENNY: Sure. That’s always a big deal.
SHELLE SANTANA: And so, it drives conversation, right? And so on some level, there is still something to be said for how much attention your brand gets.
BRIAN KENNY: Is that the any ink is good ink philosophy, or…
SHELLE SANTANA: I wouldn’t go so far as to say that any ink is good ink, but you can extend your brand exposure the more you’re part of the conversation. A lot of people were saying, “One of the ads is terrible.” Well, if that’s the lead story on the Today show when they’re talking about, “Here’s the greatest ad from yesterday’s game and here’s the worst ad,” well, you just got a few million more viewers to see your ad, right?
BRIAN KENNY: Who is the biggest, I guess is one way to describe it, who has been the most consistent advertiser on the Super Bowl?
SHELLE SANTANA: Budweiser has advertised on, I believe, all the Super Bowls, 53 Super Bowls. It’s, what, 132 ads, I think they’ve run, and to the tune of $440 million.
BRIAN KENNY: Wow.
SHELLE SANTANA: So, they are by far the biggest Super Bowl advertiser, and they’ve had some of the most iconic ads on the Super Bowl, as well.
BRIAN KENNY: In fact, the case cites one in particular as the best… I don’t know. I’m not sure who writes that, but the best ever. Which ad was that?
SHELLE SANTANA: That was the puppy love. Consumers-
BRIAN KENNY: Remember the puppy love ad?
SHELLE SANTANA: Consumers really loved that ad, and it’s just a really sweet story. It’s very enduring about this puppy who is on a farm, and the puppy manages to dig under the fence every day and run over to the barn where the majestic Clydesdales are, right? He hangs out in the barn with the Clydesdales all day, and he’s eventually adopted by someone, and their car is driving away, and the puppy is looking out the window with the Clydesdales out in the field, and they notice that the puppy is leaving. They actually… All the Clydesdales run down. They block the road, and then the next scene you see is the puppy running back with the Clydesdales.
BRIAN KENNY: I’m getting choked up here. This is really…
SHELLE SANTANA: The brand logo isn’t even shown until the very last screen before the screen goes to black, and the hashtag is #BestBuds from Budweiser. So, yeah. A lot of people still say that’s the best ad ever.
BRIAN KENNY: That gets to my next question, which is, can you effectively tell a story, a brand story, in 30 or 60 seconds?
SHELLE SANTANA: There are really four elements to a great story. You need to have a character. You need to have a plot. You’ve got to have some conflict or challenge that they overcome, and you have to have a moral of the story, like what’s the message we’re trying to convey? That’s actually surprisingly easy to do in 30 or 60 seconds. Some people, obviously, are better at it than others, but with those four pillars, you can absolutely tell a great story in a short amount of time.
BRIAN KENNY: When you augment it with social media, you can probably delve deeper into that story. Are there some examples you can think of of brands that have done well with that social media side of it?
SHELLE SANTANA: Again, just going back to Budweiser, they aired a livestream of the Clydesdales horses in their barn having a Super Bowl watch party. It was literally just a live feed of the Clydesdales in a barn, but the level of engagement of people actually watching the Clydesdales, and then when it was mentioned on air, it would spike up again, right? That was just a camera that were held on horses for a few minutes. So, these brands do a great job.
SHELLE SANTANA: Another great story that I love is Skittles this year in this year’s Super Bowl, didn’t run an ad on this Super Bowl. But instead, what they did was they did a Broadway show, because of what they realized with their insight was that, why are we advertising on the Super Bowl when people don’t buy candy? No one is running out and going for a Skittles run during the middle of the game, right? People might go for a snack run or a beer run, but not a Skittles run. So, they took their money and they invested it in this Broadway show that would air before the game, starring Michael C. Hall, and the premise of it was Michael C. Hall is this famous actor who has been approached to do a commercial for the Super Bowl, and he is agonizing over this decision because it’s going to kill his career. The signature song in the show is Advertising Ruins Everything, the tongue and cheek nature of it. This was all on social media, and then coupled with the actual live performance was one of the most interesting, and creative, and strokes of genius around Super Bowl non-advertising, but ever existing.
BRIAN KENNY: But there’s been several brands that have done that, right? They’ve gotten the attention for not being on the Super Bowl in the past. That’s a different strategy.
SHELLE SANTANA: Pepsi famously did it one year where they took all of their money out of what they would advertise on the Super Bowl and poured it into a different promotional social campaign. This year, interestingly, Coca-Cola didn’t advertise on the Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl was held in Atlanta in their backyard on their home turf, and that really created a lot of attention, as well. It was interesting because it allowed, again, from an offline branding perspective, Pepsi, who did do an ad on the Super Bowl, but also it allowed them to sort of blanket the entire arena with Pepsi advertising and Pepsi logo, which you would never see in Atlanta any other time. So, that was a very interesting move.
BRIAN KENNY: But does that signal something bigger? Is there kind of a trend moving in the opposite direction? We’re in this period of time where we’ve got a millennial generation that’s come up that really cares a lot about the social responsibility of their employers, and they want their companies to be doing the right thing. They want to feel good about where they work. I mean, could we see other big brands like that start to move in this direction, which seems to be anti-the NFL, which is this big Las Vegas type attraction?
SHELLE SANTANA: I don’t necessarily see it as an either or. I see it as a both and. What you see a lot of is firms may be taking their opportunity on Super Bowl, instead of advertising their typical product that they offer, might be advertising some of the pro-environmental, or the pro-social, or the CSR efforts that they have as a company. Verizon, for example, on this year’s Super Bowl, their spot was all about first responders, and how in times of crisis and in times of disasters, the fact that you can get a call through and get these first responders there so that they can help people in a moment of crisis. That’s a very different type of ad than what you might typically see.
BRIAN KENNY: Just to delve a little bit more into how creative has evolved over time… We heard the Goodyear ad. Obviously, we can laugh at it now, but that was a real ad back in the day. How have you seen things sort of evolve, particularly in the last, I guess, 10 or 15 years?
SHELLE SANTANA: I think that brands are, for the most part, and I would say particularly in the last maybe 5 to 10 years, have taken a much more political stance. It’s really trying to strike the right balance. So going back to these millennials who care very much about what their brands stand for, taking a stand on particular issues happens to be very important to millennials, as well, but millennials aren’t the only consumers that are out there, right? Brands serve an entire continuum, and so trying to strike the right balance of tone, and a lot of the commercials and the ads has been really tough. A few years ago, again, the Super Bowl reflects what society and culture is talking about at the time, or what we’re anxious about, or what’s animating us. And so, a few years ago, there were a lot of ads on the Super Bowl that had a political undertone to them, whether it was about immigration, whether it was about inclusiveness, and there were some consumers who loved that, and there were some consumers who absolutely hated that and they thought, hey, listen, the Super Bowl is my time to just escape and watch some really good football and some great ads, and so this isn’t the time where I want to engage in a political conversation, as well. And so this year, a lot of those politics were dialed back in the ads. Again, some people loved it. Some people said that made the ads really boring.
BRIAN KENNY: You can’t make everybody happy.
SHELLE SANTANA: You can’t make everybody happy, yeah.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I guess watching the Super Bowl with you must be fun because you’re probably watching these ads in a very different way than the rest of us.
SHELLE SANTANA: Yes. I’m sitting there analyzing it. My poor sons, they’re two teenage boys, and I’m like, “So, what do you think the brand storytelling advice was in that?” That’s a great way to clear the room of teenage boys.
BRIAN KENNY: Go get some Skittles.
SHELLE SANTANA: Yes.
BRIAN KENNY: So, I do want to engage our audience in the conversation a little bit now. We’ve got a few minutes left, time for a few questions. Let me just see. Is anybody out there interested in asking Shelle a question about Super Bowl storytelling? Yes, in the middle. We have somebody running a mic over to you.
SPEAKER 1: Thanks. Hi.
SHELLE SANTANA: Hi, how are you?
SPEAKER 1: Great talk. Thanks very much. Do you have any data to indicate that that brand storytelling actually converts into consumer behavior or consumption? So, there are these fantastic stories on the Super Bowl, but I think a lot of us look at that and say, “Hm, I wonder if that actually does drive sales.”
SHELLE SANTANA: Yeah, so this is a great question, and it’s one of the things that I talk about with my students. At the brand level, one of the things I say is, “If you’re going to be doing any sort of promotion, Super Bowl advertising tends to be a flashpoint because it’s so much money.” And so, the first thing is, what do we really want to get out of this? Do we want to get brand awareness, brand engagement? We want people tweeting. But then the question is, how does that translate into sales down the road? The correlation between brand awareness, and brand engagement, and brand activity and sales, there is a correlation there, but the correlation isn’t one, to be frank, and it’s a long tail effect, often.
SHELLE SANTANA: So, a lot of times, you have to just be patient. What I ask my students is, “Let’s think about the opposite, which is, if we don’t do this at all, would we have the exact same sales?” I think there’s stronger evidence of when brands don’t invest in advertising and messaging and storytelling on a consistent basis, you see almost an immediate decline in sales. When they do invest, it tends to either remain stable or go up, but it may not do that in the immediate short-term, right? It’s a patient long-term play, unless, in that ad, there’s a very specific call to action like if you call within the next 30 minutes, then you’ll get X, right? That doesn’t typically tend to happen on Super Bowl.
BRIAN KENNY: Other questions? Yes, up front here. In the back, sorry.
SPEAKER 2: You mentioned a little bit, people staying away from political ads, for instance, this past year. I’d be curious to hear more on the negative effects a bad Super Bowl ad can have on a brand, and then if that’s sort of affected people saying, “We’re going to stay out this year. We just don’t want to go there because of the chance of having a negative reaction is too great.”
SHELLE SANTANA: Yeah. Having a really big backlash on Super Bowl can have a negative effect on a brand, but it’s a calculation that I think the best brands make and they make wisely, right? And so, a separate case that I have is on Nike and Colin Kaepernick and the decision to use Colin Kaepernick as the face of the 30th anniversary of the Just Do It campaign. There was a lot of hand-wringing over that. It wasn’t obvious that this was a good decision, but the calculation came down to… And this is public information. You can see this in the press. There are going to be a segment of our consumers who will abandon us, and there will be a segment of consumers who stay, who are more committed, who buy more and will bring more people into the fold because of this. The calculation and the math, frankly, is, which one is bigger? That’s how you sort of assess the risk.
BRIAN KENNY: Another question down front here.
SPEAKER 3: Thanks for your perspectives so far. I’m just curious if you would be thinking about next year’s Super Bowl, or as we like to say sometimes, the New England invitational.
SHELLE SANTANA: I like that.
SPEAKER 3: Would you be willing to hazard a guess at what you think the storytelling tone will be January of 2020?
BRIAN KENNY: I think we just lost all of our listeners in the New York area.
SHELLE SANTANA: Yes. Me being a New York Giants fan, I have to say, it’s a little tough to take, but okay. Yeah. It’s very hard to tell because culture shifts very quickly, but I think what you can see from this year’s past ad, when you are past Super Bowl, when you look at the ads in total, there were a couple of very clear themes that bubbled up. One was sort of this rise of the machine, and fear of AI and technology, and sort of like our lives are being controlled by these smart devices, and then there was another theme around women’s empowerment, right? Those were kind of two themes that really emerged very clearly. I think the women’s empowerment theme will quite possibly resonate into the next Super Bowl, as well. Then I think, frankly, a lot has to do with what happens in the political climate as to what kind of the other platform is going to be or sort of the other major theme. Right now, I think climate change, if I had to hazard a guess. I think something around climate change and what are brands doing to be more environmental, more broadly, not just climate change, but an emphasis on environmental awareness, climate change, things like that. I can see that being sort of an animating force, again, because that’s just so important to millennial consumers.
BRIAN KENNY: We have time for one more question, folks. Yes.
SPEAKER 4: You mentioned that there’s a lot of polls that occurred during the game and the day after, regarding rating of the ads. Obviously, all advertisers aspire to have the best ad, but what happens when your ad flops? How big of an impact is that on your brand value, your brand reputation?
SHELLE SANTANA: I think it depends on the size of the brand, quite frankly, right? There are two things I want to say about this. The first is that I have my students rate the ads, and then I compare that to what the national sample is on USA Today, and it’s not the same at all. And so, the first takeaway for them is, you are not representative. So, this is very important for you to understand, you are not representative. Then in terms of ads that flop, I think it depends on why they flop. I’ll give you an example. My students really loved the Bumble ad with Serena Williams. They thought that ad was fantastic. That ad did not do well on a national level, in terms of resonating with consumers. I haven’t heard that it’s actually hurt Bumble at all. It may be a case of maybe this particular audience was too broad for the message that we were trying to convey at this point in time. But when you’re Budweiser and you’ve run 132 ads, not all of those ads are great, but they’ve been able to sort of sustain themselves. So, some of it has to do with the size of the brand.
SHELLE SANTANA: Another one where it’s a very small brand… This was, I think, on the 2014 Super Bowl. There was a 15 person company, Goldie Blocks, who won a contest and they advertised on the Super Bowl. They haven’t advertised on the Super Bowl since, but that was a huge boost to them, just getting awareness out there. So, it goes both ways, for sure.
HANNAH BATES: That was former Harvard Business School professor Shelle Santana in conversation with Brian Kenny on Cold Call. Fun fact, that episode was their first ever live episode!
We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about business strategy from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review.
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This episode was produced by Anne Saini, and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Nicole Smith, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.
