This year’s Super Bowl has a fresh feel to it. No Brady or Mahomes, and only the third ever appearance for the Cincinnati Bengals. But as the Bengals face off against the LA Rams, they won’t be the only new faces. Much like last year, we can expect a wave of brands to make their debut in the world’s most-watched ad event.

With such a huge audience, a Super Bowl is viewed by many marketers as a chance to do bold, career-defining work. But the most effective ads are the ones that manage to entertain that massive crowd. Some are genuinely bold – some are just really well done.

The best ads aren’t always from typical Super Bowl advertisers, either. Huggies is not a brand you’d typically associate with the big game, but last year they topped our charts as the brand that produced the most effective Super Bowl ad with the biggest emotional response. When it comes to winning ads, the field is wide open. So what can we expect to see?

Communicating through fluent devices

“Whassup?” Allstate’s Mayhem. “Got Milk?” The GEICO Gecko.

We know that once more fluent devices will take centre stage.

Fluent devices are more than just good ideas – they're characters and scenarios which repeat across ads and create new stories. They’re vehicles for advertisers to create meaning and spark emotion and drive long term brand building. They establish situations and characters which can be recognised immediately by the viewer, making recognition faster and delivering positive emotion more quickly.

Fluency is all about speed of processing – along with Fame and Feeling it’s one of the three main heuristics that drives System 1 decision-making. The rule of thumb of Fluency is – if you can recognise something quickly, it must be a good choice. Or to put it another way, familiarity breeds contentment.

In the middle of a Super Bowl, with a distracted audience, something familiar can be a real boon for getting attention. The animated M&M characters are always strong performers with audiences, and their Super Bowl ads – like the one with Red M&M turning into Danny DeVito - have often posted exceptional scores.

Focus on fame

Celebrity offers another way for brands to cut through and get attention. Every year brands line up celebrities and influencers in their ads, and for good reason. Our lists of the most effective ads are always studded with celebrities, like the Muppets for Doordash and Shaggy for Cheetos in 2021.

Celebrities aren’t always a winning tactic, though. They’re very good for short-term fame, grabbing the attention of audiences to remind them of a brand and build mental availability. High profile brand ambassadors can be a big asset if used consistently. But if the underlying brand isn’t so strong then there’s a risk the audience only cares about the celebrity and the ad doesn’t create enough Fluency. If the only source of positive emotion in the ad is its star, it’s no surprise that the brand doesn’t benefit much long-term.

So expect celebrity winners but also a few brands who blow the budget on a famous face and get upstaged.

Meet the Disruptors 

In the year 2000, the Super Bowl was contested by a new wave of “dot com” businesses. But after a short spike - the bubble burst and the dot-com pioneers quickly disappeared.

Last year was a similar story. Long term sponsors such as Coke, Pepsi and Budweiser all stepped aside and reassessed how they would promote themselves amidst the pandemic.  This opened the food for brands like Vroom, Mercari, Fiverr and Robinhood - tech businesses who sensed it was their time to leverage the Super Bowl’s unique limelight.

And 2022 may be the year of the crypto ad. Brands such as FTX, a crypto exchange that has previously advertised with Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, have reportedly paid millions for a Super Bowl slot, and rivals Crypto.com are also expected to run multiple national spots of its own.

There’s so much VC money pouring into the web3 space that we’re likely to see plenty of new tech brands at the Super Bowl this year and next.  Is it a good move for them?

Tech brands historically face a dilemma at the Super Bowl. They have 30 seconds to explain their service to the world, but they also need to entertain and get attention like anyone else. That’s a tricky balance to strike, and with something as hard to understand as crypto the stakes are raised even higher. If a crypto ad lands in the top 10, that will be a big surprise and a big success.

Commercials and COVID

Brands are facing the same questions we all are. With the pandemic still ongoing, should we “move on” from COVID? And if so, how?

The days of brands getting plaudits and audience love for heartwarming Covid-themed ads are long gone. Our testing of UK Christmas ads found that directly referencing COVID was a big turn-off for audiences, and there’s no reason to think this won’t be true of the Super Bowl too. Audiences engage with ads that show them a different, somewhat happier world.

Of course, the effects of the pandemic linger behind the scenes – many of this year’s commercials will have been conceived and filmed with COVID-era restrictions affecting their casting and scale. We still won’t be seeing many big party scenes – unless CGI is involved. What we will see will be lots of family scenes and one-on-one communication. Forcing ads to operate at a more intimate scale should actually help them connect, as audiences relate most to vivid, living characters with lots of gestures, expressions and non-verbal communication.

Diversity wins  

Having diverse and inclusive representation in adverts will continue to play a critical role for brands at Super Bowl LVI. Not just because it's the right thing to do - but because it works.  

Brands have made an effort to represent America in all its diverse glory in recent years, and we’ve seen more and more ads in our Top 10 which feature inclusive casts and diverse stars.

At System1, our UK “Feeling Seen” research showed that ads which featured diverse casts and stories earned a ‘diversity dividend’ - as long as they were effective with the general population they scored even higher ratings with the segment represented in the ad. Representation improves emotional response: feeling seen feels good.

But this needs to be done with empathy. Avoiding shallow representation - showing people from an under-represented group but in a way that feels inauthentic and diluted - is a big challenge for advertisers. Diverse groups don’t think or act as one – it’s better to tell someone’s story well than try and tell everyone’s story badly.

Super Bowl LVI will have a distinctive feel. And not just because there is no Tom Brady. New brands will attempt to navigate the emerging post-pandemic landscape. And we know that the brands who will take this year’s effectiveness crown will be those that focus on humanity and storytelling - drawing us into their world rather than forcing us to reflect on ours.