It’s been two weeks since the Super Bowl, but the most important data from advertising’s biggest night lands now, after the noise has died and the industry has moved on to arguing about something else.
That’s the problem.
Every year, the game becomes a weeklong festival of hot takes, rankings, and creative commentary. The game itself produces a clear winner, but in the industry, we speak too generally about Super Bowl advertising as if it’s all the same. But the game produces winners and losers in advertising as well.
Which is why Ipsos deserves more attention this week than anything written during the frenzied days in the run up or immediately after the Super Bowl.
The research firm tracked spontaneous brand recall among Super Bowl viewers: the simplest and most demanding test in advertising. Just a survey asking consumers which brands they remembered being advertised during the game.
Ipsos measured it the next morning. And again, a week later.
The results make for deeply uncomfortable reading for many of the brands that committed their budget and teams to a 30- or 60-second spot.
Budweiser was the Seahawks of the evening.
Its “American Icons” spot—a foal and a newly-hatched bald eagle growing up together over the years to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’—achieved spontaneous recall of nearly twenty million viewers the morning after the game.
A week later, that number had climbed to twenty-three million. Perhaps a signature of a campaign that made it into actual memory rather than mere social feeds.
Pepsi came second, 12 million viewers still able to recall the brand the next day. Their polar bear blind taste test—Coca-Cola’s own mascot choosing Pepsi over Coke—landed because it was built on decades of competitive positioning and the oldest tactic from the cola wars: the challenge.
