Sorry for the delay.
The idea was for this issue to come out the Monday after the Super Bowl to tap into the creativity of the ads that run during this event. However, my lawyers at Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel warned me that this might break the promise to talk exclusively about creativity in the football industry.
But since the Super Bowl is football, even if it is mainly played with the hands, and the ads are creative, or were, I was finally given the green light.
What's so special about the Super Bowl?
In addition to enshrining a champion and having a spectacular halftime show, the football final achieves what all of us in advertising dream of: that people want to watch the ads (and not just our mums).
The ads have always been so creative that they generate a lot of expectation and often get a lot of media coverage.
The bar is set so high that the fear of failure is also high. That's why more and more brands are falling back on tried and tested formulas. Nostalgia, hits, hyperbole and celebrities, lots of celebrities. If they can bring old friends back together, so much the better. This year, for example, there were reunions of Arnold Schwarzenegger with Danny DeVito (Twins), Zach Braff with Donald Faison (Scrubs), Aubrey Plaza with Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation), Jennifer Anniston with David Schwimmer (Friends) and Ben Affleck with Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting).
So, while the original idea was to share the most creative Super Bowl ads, I've had to recalculate and go back in time to find (some of) the most creative ads in the history of the event. Four ads that made a real and lasting impact. Starting with Apple.
1984 (Apple)
It's hard to know if Apple would be what it is today without this ad which, despite the 1984 Super Bowl being the only time it aired on national television, had a profound impact on Americans.
It was a gamble. They took advantage of the fact that the year coincided with the name of George Orwell's dystopian novel and suggested that IBM's success could lead to a Big Brother-like state. That's not speculation, Steve Jobs said so.
They also went all in on the production: the spot was directed by Ridley Scott, who was the master of science fiction after his breakthrough with Blade Runner.
And it paid off. The spot caused a sensation and was played on TV programmes without any advertising fee, it was chosen as the best ad of the decade and generated the sale of three and a half million Apple computers, which was crazy at the time.
Wassup (Budweiser)
Already in 1999, it was Budweiser that made its mark. But it needed neither the showmanship nor the defiant tone of Apple. A simple greeting between friends became an instant icon of popular culture.
Like a girl (Always)
This ad is best explained by itself. Besides the atomic power of the insight they found, I really like it for launching this message of female empowerment in a historically masculine environment like the Super Bowl.
Bradshaw Stain + It’s a Tide ad (Tide)
It's hard to get a hit into the Super Bowl, but to do it two years in a row with two ads as different as Tide did is just incredible.
In 2017, they harnessed the power of second screens to get into the conversation from a stain on the shirt of one of the game's narrators.
In 2018, they did it from great observation: all the ads are Tide ads, because people always have clean clothes.
And some football...
Real football is starting to become popular in the US and this could also be seen in the Super Bowl ads: three of the spots had a link to the world of the other football, ours, through David Beckham, Lionel Messi and Wrexham AFC.