System1’s data is brutal on this point. Ads featuring brand characters averaged 3.8 Stars on their long term brand building scale. Celebrity spots averaged just 2.7.
Brand character ads registered significantly greater short term sales potential too: a 1.38 Spike Rating versus 0.86 for celebrity ads.
Yet only 10% of Super Bowl ads use brand characters. While 39% feature celebrities.
There’s a paradox here. The assets that drive branded recall — sonic cues, brand characters, jingles — are the least utilized by brand managers eager to embrace complexity, creativity, and cool at the cost of effectiveness.
A 2020 Ipsos study measured DBAs on their likelihood to increase branded attention versus their prevalence across 2,000 video ads. The results show an industry whose activities are in perfect opposition to impact.
Those cereal brands with their childish characters and old-fashioned jingles are building mental availability that lasts decades while everyone else burns through celebrities and brand recall at an alarming rate. Big Chalk found State Farm achieved 56% proper attribution in 2024 partly because the brand spent years building Jake from State Farm into a distinctive character. Ipsos cites Budweiser as the most recalled Super Bowl advertiser primarily because of its iconic Clydesdales.
And that’s exactly why Svedka’s Fembot is back. When that chrome figure appears after halftime, viewers who grew up with the brand will experience instant recognition. New consumers will begin their own associative journey with the robot. Every exposure cues branded recall and builds on previous exposures, delivering “compound creativity” — assets that generate accelerating returns over time.
The Fembot’s return reminds us that brand assets don’t depreciate the way marketers assume. Constellation’s decision to retire the character in 2012 reflects a common industry mistake: new teams feel old assets seem dated, so it’s time for something fresh. Marketers get bored with the very things that drive consumer success – usually at exactly the point they start having proper impact.
Brand characters, jingles, packaging shapes — these aren’t creative clichés. They’re compounding investments in mental availability. The brands that understand this build assets over decades and use them mercilessly. The brands that don’t just chase novelty and wonder why awareness doesn’t stick.
Mark Ritson will teach the ADWEEK MiniMBA in Marketing in April 2026, a ten-week MBA level program for senior managers who never received (or have completely forgotten) proper marketing training. Sign up here.
