Super Bowl ad strategy: what top CMOs learned from game day 2024

Executive overview

Most Super Bowl ads waste their moment — buying reach but not customers. The brands that won in 2024 treated the game as one chapter in a longer story, not a standalone event.

The shift is from TV spectacle to 360 campaign: the Super Bowl spot works hardest when surrounded by experiential, social, and performance layers before, during, and after.

Experiential and sampling are underused

• Vegas logistics were exceptional; brands barely tapped the opportunity
• Frito-Lay hosted a Cheetos Chapel activation — an employee couple got married there spontaneously, generating more emotion than any planned creative
• Elf held presence at NFL TikTok tailgate events to reach its audience in person
• E-Trade sponsored Pickle Slam (Steffi Graf, Agassi, McEnroe, Sharapova) the Sunday before the game
• For future Super Bowls (New Orleans), brands with spots should add Wed–Fri sampling campaigns, film the content, and use it as social creative on game day

Surround sound beats matching luggage

• "Matching luggage" = repurposing the TV spot as banner ads and social posts; this wastes the investment
• CeraVe ran a three-phase campaign: fake speculation (Michael Cera "founded" the brand), public fight, resolution — generating billions of PR and social impressions before the spot aired
• The brief was not "make a Super Bowl ad" — it was "build an immersive storytelling world across 360 touchpoints"
• Uber Eats amplified effectively by jumping on the Beckham meme weeks in advance
• Social-first creative built around platform context outperforms repurposed TV assets

Audience before content

• Elf identified that women were ~50% of Super Bowl viewers but beauty brands took less than 1% of ad slots — a clear gap to own
• The brand chose Jennifer Coolidge (year one) because she indexed equally with Gen Z and older demos — universal enough for 115M viewers
• Year two brief: universal truths (halo glow product love, courtroom drama obsession, price-vs-quality debate) combined into one culturally resonant spot
• Kia used the game to signal EV commitment when competitors were retreating; shopping-site traffic and brand consideration hit record highs post-game
• Alaska Airlines stripped celebrity out entirely, leaned into product (most legroom in premium cabin), and accepted it would not top ad meter — because business clarity mattered more

Performance and business orientation

• DoorDash won by capturing first-party data at scale; it left game day with a measurable new customer base
• Opendoor ran a live halftime home sale in Atlanta — sold a house in under nine minutes, streamed it, cut back to the customer live in Q3; pre-game teasers generated massive free PR
• E-Trade launched a post-game "Money Monday" offer, targeting the 68M people who bet over the weekend, driving account opens with a limited-time offer
• Gary's benchmark: brands that offered a time-limited deal tied to "$58 for Super Bowl 58" framing could have converted awareness to revenue directly
• Actualized reach (Super Bowl's ~130M viewers) > potential reach (digital, email, billboards) — but only if there is a call to action

Creative principles from the roundtables

• Reese's Caramel Big Cup stood out by using no celebrities, no CGI — pure clean comedy rooted in a product truth
• M&M's "Almost Champions" honored teams that never won a ring, rooted in the brand's belonging purpose; insight sourced from internal fan stories before every creative meeting
• Oreo's "Twist On It" platform was built around a real consumer ritual — the twist before eating — making distinctiveness structural rather than cosmetic
• Doritos leaned into the launch of Dina Rita; the two leads had been friends for 35 years but were cast separately — discovered by accident, became a story asset
• Biggest risk at the scale of the Super Bowl: memorable creative attributed to the wrong brand; distinctiveness is the baseline requirement

What the next decade of Super Bowl advertising looks like

• 20–40% of ads will carry a direct call to action within ten years
• Social media will sell more product on any given day than the Super Bowl; the game's value is concentrated reach, not total volume
• CMOs trained classically can adapt — COVID-era crash courses in social content proved it is learnable
• Internal culture: E-Trade engaged record employee numbers the day after the game; Gabrielle (Mars) started every creative meeting with an "almost champion" story from a team member
• The industry over-indexes on creativity as spectacle and under-indexes on business outcomes; the two are not mutually exclusive