Last night’s Super Bowl featured a familiar mix of celebrity cameos, inside jokes and, of course, Clydesdales. Less familiar, perhaps? A choir of singing toilets.
The ads are always almost as big a storyline as the game itself. Tim Riester, founder and CEO of the creative agency Riester, joined The Show to talk more about them.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: I wanted to start with some ads you saw last night that you particularly liked. Ads, of course, are meant to be memorable. That's a particularly difficult challenge when every ad is the advertiser's biggest creative swing of the year.
But there are three that stayed with you. The first one is this ad for Lay's potato chips, where we see a father and a daughter sitting on the front porch looking out at their farm. And it tells the story of the father literally handing the daughter the keys to the family business. Let's hear just a quick clip from the beginning.
TIM RIESTER: Oh, my gosh. In advertising, emotional messages are always the most successful, especially among Super Bowl advertising. Emotional commercials are five times more effective than commercials that do not carry that same emotion. And this was the best of the best.
What I loved most about this is the purpose of the story to the advertiser. Lay's, I think, fights all these natural, these organic potato chip companies that come out every year. They wanted to demonstrate a history of dealing with American farms and being fresh.
What better way to share that story than to talk about and show a little girl who was raised on an American farm, and it's time to pass the torch through the generations? And how beautiful that the farmer is passing it to his daughter. And it's not the stereotypical son who takes over the farm.
DINGMAN: Yes, yes. I also think it's interesting, this idea of natural food, organic farming, in contrast with the Mike Tyson ad that we saw for realfood.gov. Mike Tyson, obviously a very controversial figure. The natural food movement, raw food movement, sort of associated with the MAHA movement, also very controversial. Hard to argue with a father and a daughter.
RIESTER: Yeah. And I hand it to Mike Tyson. The story was genuine about his sister. It was very touching. The producers of the commercial, in my opinion, made big mistake when they had him laugh in the middle when he talked about how powerful America is and how obese America is. And then they show him laughing when he takes a bite of the apple.
It was a gesture of discomfort for me. I don't think publicly we should shame people who are fighting obesity. I think we should reach out and help them.
DINGMAN: So Tim, I know you also really liked the polar bear ad. Now, when people hear the "polar bear" and "ad" in the Super Bowl, they're probably thinking Coca Cola. But this was a Pepsi ad.
RIESTER: This was absolutely brilliant from Pepsi. Many people don't realize that mascots are the most effective form of advertising, especially in the Super Bowl. They outperform celebrities year after year after year by more than 20% difference in gain and brand recognition. But what's unusual is only 10% of the advertisers use mascots in the Super Bowl, which is really a curious mistake.
Pepsi drilled it. Not only did they use a mascot, but they took their competitor's mascot. It was so clever. When the polar bear does the taste test and chooses Pepsi over Coca Cola, he then has to see the psychiatrist. He goes through his life struggles because his identity has been associated with Coca Cola.
And they even tie into pop culture at the end of that commercial where they show the polar bear and his date at the game in the box being captured on the Jumbotron with their Pepsi. Similar to the Coldplay episode.
DINGMAN: That's right.
RIESTER: With that CEO and his employee who were caught having an affair.
DINGMAN: Yes. Although I have to say that was an odd moment for me because that incident was very associated with sort of like public shaming, and they're trying to get you to feel warm towards Pepsi. So it's sort of an odd turn at the end, I thought.
RIESTER: Well, as an advertiser myself, the hard part of that is identifying Pepsi with the mascot because it's already so well branded with Coca Cola. So you had to do things that really drive home the fact that the polar bear is choosing Pepsi even though its whole career has been associated with Coke. So those instances that were shown really help the viewer understand this was indeed a Pepsi commercial.
DINGMAN: OK. Well Tim, I know you also really liked — there was an ad for Redfin about being good neighbors.
RIESTER: Back to emotions. Last year, the same advertiser — Rocket Mortgage, Redfin, the same company — they did a beautiful job. It's really hard to do such a good job two years in a row. And they did.
This is a story about a Latino family that relocates into what appears to be an all-white neighborhood. And at first they're just not accepted. You know, the little girl doesn't seem accepted. Her dad doesn't seem accepted until the storm comes through.
The little girl finds one of the other neighbor's dogs, and they become friends. The father, the Latino father, cuts down a tree that had fallen across the driveway of his neighbor, and they become friends.
I loved the moment that this captured culturally with this commercial. America's really been struggling with acceptance in some parts right now. And this showed that, hey, we're all the same. We want to feel safe, we want to have someone to love. We care about our family. And if we can just give each other a chance, we can all live in the same community.
It was wonderfully done.
DINGMAN: Well, just about a minute left here, Tim, and I wanted to ask you. There's also obviously a lot of talk this morning about the halftime show, which most people don't think of as an ad, but as you have pointed out, it is, in a way, marketing.
RIESTER: It was brilliant marketing by the NFL. My hat goes off to these folks. Not only did they run two commercials that really hit home — mental health and the importance of being positive with children — but their entire halftime show embraced a community, Puerto Rico, that has been part of the United States since 1898.
And it took us on a tour of the Latino culture in such a beautiful way. And I don't speak Spanish. And by the end of that halftime, I wish I did because I wanted to get even closer to what I was learning.
They began by taking us on a journey through a sugarcane field. They took us through a Latino wedding. They showed how the senior, the men were together at a table playing dominoes.
I mean, there was so much about it that made me feel so close and respectful of that community. And, you know, the NFL is trying to reach out and embrace Spanish-speaking countries to share an American product, the NFL. And I can't think of a better way to bring them in to experience the Super Bowl than to respect them during the halftime.
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