So what separates the winners from the losers? It’s mostly a story of consistency.
Michelob Ultra and Ring made special Super Bowl ads. Budweiser and Pepsi didn’t. They extended long-running campaigns into the Super Bowl opportunity. It’s not a small distinction.
This was the 48th time the Clydesdales appeared during the game. Forty-eight years of the same visual assets and the same emotional territory. Think of it the other way: decades of ignoring hot agencies and ambitious new CMOs wanting to “put their stamp on things.” Either way, the sight of a horse trotting across a field now makes 20 million people think of one beer and one beer only.
These kinds of long-running campaigns outperform short, opportunistic ones by margins that should embarrass every creative director who has ever pitched a “fresh direction.” Binet and Field at the IPA. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. System1. All of them show that the longer you run a campaign, the more effective it becomes. The more distinctive your assets, the faster your brand registers in memory and bypasses the analytical mind entirely.
Most marketers know this. But very few act on it, because patience is not rewarded in quarterly business cycles and it certainly won’t win any industry awards.
Our industry is structurally biased toward newness. Marketers want to make new ads, and their agencies, who get paid handsomely to create new work and nothing to run the old, aren’t incentivized to argue with them.
Some brands used the biggest advertising night of the year to launch something bespoke, something special, something that will live nowhere after this column runs.
Budweiser used it to add one more chapter to something it started building before most of the CMOs were born. The Clydesdales are not a campaign. They are forty-eight years of compound creativity, a lesson in holding the wheel and staying the course.
It’s not a complicated lesson. It’s just one that the industry has no financial incentive to learn or any institutional capacity to retain.
