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As of Sunday, we’ll be three weeks out from Super Bowl LI. By this time last year, three brands had already released teaser ads for their Super Bowl campaigns, and three more had shared creative.
This year is a different story with the lineup of Super Bowl brands remaining surprisingly quiet.
So far, we’ve only seen creative from Intel, which released a 30-second spot starring NFL MVP Tom Brady scheduled to air during the February 5th Super Bowl broadcast.
For Super Bowl 50, Butterfinger and Wix both released teaser videos in December of 2015, more than a month before the game. By the second week of January, Turbo Tax had also released teaser ads. Taco Bell and SunTrust Bank didn’t release video ads, but both brands had shared creative from their Super Bowl 50 campaigns.
Taco Bell’s ‘redacted’ release for Super Bowl 50
Carla Marshall, the editor in chief of TubularInsights.com, says she believes brands are getting more savvy when it comes to consumer fatigue around large-scale events like the Super Bowl.
“We know there is a lot of excitement and anticipation around Super Bowl content, but a long run-up in terms of teasers may have less impact than a big launch a few days before,” says Marshall, “I think this is the year we will see some of the bigger brands take a slightly different approach to try and capture the public’s attention at exactly the right time, and measure the ROI that has.”
Devra Prywes, the SVP of Marketing and Insight for video analytics firm Unruly, agrees with Marshall. She says brands may be realizing that Super Bowl teaser ads are not driving the awareness or engagement when compared to their official Super Bowl spots.
“In fact, we actually saw something quite interesting happen last year for the first time,” says Prywes, “While main ads outperformed teasers, the extended versions of TV spots often were more shared than the aired versions.”
Prywes says this was true for Heinze’s “Weiner Stampede,” T-Mobile’s “Restricted Bling,” the NFL’s “Super Bowl Babies Choir” and Audi’s “Commander.”
Data from Unruly’s “Science of Sharing: Super Bowl 50” report found that teaser ads made up nearly 30 percent of the total number of Super Bowl 50 ads that were launched, but only accounted for 10 percent of overall views and two percent of shares.
Prywes says for teaser ads to make an impact, they have to make a strong emotional connection – and that can be a challenge with such a short run-time.
“Based on our data, teasers tend to be distracting – for splitting budget and attention,” says Prywes, “As even the best ads need to be seen to be shared, it’s more effective to reinvest that budget into distribution to deliver the main ad to a brand’s target audience everywhere these people are already consuming video.”
We suspect to see more activity in the coming days. One brand confirmed over email it plans on sharing details around creative for its Super Bowl LI campaign next week.
As Super Bowl teaser and full-length ads drop, we’ll be adding them to our Super Bowl LI advertiser round-up where you can stay on top of all this year’s Super Bowl brands: Super Bowl LI advertisers: Here are the brands gearing up for game day.
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