Would you write that Super Bowl cheque?

As the UK packs away its Christmas advertising toys, the US unboxes its own frenzied advertising inventory – Super Bowl 2026, with all its giddy pre-amble.

So although this should really be the quarter when we bring due professional scrutiny to our recent festive fare (now that the actual in-market performance of its multiple protagonists is known, and prior growth trajectories resumed or reset) the jig has moved on.

Our urge to ‘speculate before’ rather than ‘legislate after’ the event finds new purchase on the other side of the Atlantic.

At the time of writing, the vexed question of whether Pepsi’s much-heralded ad is, in fact, a great ad for Coke seems to have garnered the most fervent attention from advertising’s chattering class. It’s an inconvenient truth that only time will truly tell: markets are messier than we sometimes imagine, and people can be too.

Making the biggest advertising decision of all

One of the hidden dangers of ‘the Super Bowl ad’, meanwhile - just as it is for our Christmas commercials - is that advertisers strain so hard to seize the tactical moment that strategy gets left behind, and brand communication becomes discontinuous: a bigger risk to brand-owners than even the most misguided one-off execution. (Pepsi, unfortunately, has form in both regards.)

For all the hoopla about the ads themselves, though, there is one bigger question at large. It sometimes seems that we’ve become so pre-occupied by ‘how to’ advertise that we neglect to ask ‘whether to advertise (and, if so, at what investment level)?’: the existential query that Jeremy Bullmore once described as the biggest advertising decision of all, and one that Les Binet has thrown useful new light on.

With its epically high cost of entry (constrained by its limited supply of advertising minutage, compared to our sprawling Christmas season) the Superbowl brings that question into sharp relief. Would you write the multimillion dollar cheque that even a brief appearance in the game demands? Here are three reasons that I would.

Great creative needs wide distribution

First of all, and most obviously, mass audiences are becoming more elusive as media fragments. Yet marketing science tells us that most brands should (still!) reach as wide as they can to reach the light buyers and ‘future demand’ that power growth. The Super Bowl doesn’t reach everybody but it’s as close as you’ll get in one hit.

Andrew Tindall’s new magnum opus may be titled ‘The Creative Dividend’ but its greatest legacy may in fact be his reminder that great creative must (still!) be widely distributed. ‘Busy work’, ‘paid noise’ and even a ‘cult hit’ are all sub-optimal outcomes for the advertiser; the fates that both brand-owners and agencies must strive to avoid.

The value in sending out a 'costly' signal

Secondly, the Super Bowl affords us a prime example of the ‘costly signalling’ that folk like Rory Sutherland and Richard Shotton have explained and endorsed: the notion that the meaning and significance we attach to something is often proportional to the expense with which it's communicated. It’s a theory of advertising that may have its roots in evolutionary biology but has found support elsewhere, not least (suitably enough) in an academic paper from Duke University exploring how reported adspend impacts the perceived quality of athletic brands.

See Apple’s ‘1984’ Super Bowl spot for signalling theory turned into practice: a commercial decision that made no sense until it did. Given how often ‘1984’ is still cited in opinion polls, and the body language it established for the Apple brand, it’s fair to say it’s still paying back. Such is the upside of memory-making.

There's latent magic in shared media and moments

Thirdly, the Super Bowl offers a rare collective advertising experience. As our advertising media have become increasingly personalised (and our messaging, foolishly, also) we have unwittingly given back some of the commercial upside that accrues to publicity (Barnum’s ‘humbug’, as described by Paul Feldwick) and network effects more generally. If brands rely on shared meaning, as most surely do, there’s latent magic in the media and moments that we come together; where we know that others are seeing what we see.

Unlike the math of reach, these latter impacts – or contributions – are difficult to measure, but they are none the less real for being so.

As we continue our pursuit of effectiveness over efficiency, we would do well to remind ourselves to measure what we make and not just to make what we measure.

Laurence Green is Director of Effectiveness at the IPA.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.