The Super Bowl isn’t just the crowning game of the NFL season; it’s also the biggest night of the year for the advertising industry. For a mere $266,666 per second, companies can reach the 125 million expected viewers of Super Bowl LX6 with their new flashy commercial. And as Kellogg’s Derek Rucker wrote in 2022, those ads are the most exciting part of the night for some viewers.
“Super Bowl ads often feature ad agencies’ best and most-creative work,” Rucker says. “A lot of effort goes into designing and delivering Super Bowl spots, and this makes them a spectacle to behold that people want to be a part of.”
But the world of advertising has changed dramatically in the last decade, and not just in the shift from big-budget commercials to online influencers. Faculty at Kellogg’s Department of Marketing have scientifically studied trends in diversity, AI, ad-campaign metrics, and the effectiveness of TV commercials in the modern media landscape.
Read the main takeaways from their research below, and be sure to tune in for the annual Super Bowl Ad Review by professors Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker on February 9.
1. Diversity in commercials has big benefits
Conventional wisdom says that advertisements should target the most likely customers. For example, cosmetics commercials often only show young women using their product, while beer commercials are more likely to show men.
But a study by professor of marketing Aparna Labroo and colleagues found that featuring a diverse group of people in an advertisement has many concrete benefits. Most notably, consumers who saw more diversity—in terms of different ages, races, genders, or nationalities—in a brand’s ads were willing to pay more for that brand’s products.
The reason? People believed that brands showcasing diversity in their ads offered a greater variety of products and were more creative overall.
“If an ad shows people who look different, consumers spontaneously seem to think that those people must have different needs and that a company that meets such diverse needs must be more innovative and creative,” Labroo says. “And consumers who think this way are more willing to use the product and to pay more for it.”
2. AI will make advertising more personal—and persuasive
Thanks to the internet, we’re all accustomed to targeted ads that mine our browsing data to make a personalized pitch. But with the advent of new generative AI tools, these customized commercials will become even more ubiquitous, according to assistant professor of marketing Jacob Teeny.
“This specific influence tactic, personalized persuasion, is now going to be more scalable and widely deployed than ever before,” Teeny says.
But how do consumers react to these AI-generated appeals? In a series of studies, Teeny and colleagues from Columbia and Stanford tested ad messaging written by ChatGPT and meant to appeal to people with specific personality traits such as extroversion or conscientiousness. They found that people with those traits preferred the customized messages to generic ads—even when told that they were created by AI.
That’s good news for companies experimenting with AI-driven marketing. But for the rest of us, this new frontier of messaging requires everyone to be even more mindful of the content they read online, Teeny says.
“We’re going to be inundated with things that naturally feel like they appeal to us,” he says. “So we might have to take a second step to really investigate the source or the veracity of the message—whether that’s in regard to a consumer product or in regard to a political news article.”
3. Energetic ads hold viewers’ attention
If you think TV commercials are getting louder, faster, and busier, you’re not just getting old. A Kellogg study of more than 27,000 ads found that the energy of commercials has increased over time—and that higher-energy ads kept viewers watching.
Lakshman Krishnamurthi, A. Montgomery Ward Professor of Marketing at Kellogg, and colleagues adapted a measure of “energy” from Spotify to assess the audio and visual intensity of television ads. They found that this metric increased by 33 percent between 2015 and 2018, reflecting a shift toward noisier and more hectic commercials.
The researchers also found that viewers don’t mind this boisterous approach. Overall, higher energy levels resulted in fewer people tuning out, after controlling for network, day of the week, and the time within the program that the ad aired.
The energy increase may be related to a 2010 law that prevented commercials from using louder volume than surrounding programs.
“Advertisers know now that they can’t increase the loudness of their ads, so they are looking for other ways to gain viewers’ attention,” Krishnamurthi says. “Our research shows increasing the energy of ads can do this, and now advertisers can continue to tweak their ads to find the right fit.”
4. Make sure you know what you’re measuring
The ultimate metric most marketers swear by is return on ad spend, or ROAS. But when Kellogg’s Eric Anderson and Brett Gordon looked at the growing digital advertising sphere of retail-media networks, they found that small decisions around how ROAS is calculated can make a big difference.
In theory, retail-media networks should make this calculation simple. Pioneered by giants such as Amazon and Walmart, the model places sponsored links on the “digital shelf” of an online shopping site. These platforms can then measure which users saw the ads and connect that exposure to eventual purchases.
And yet, Anderson and Gordon warn that platforms may use very different methods to calculate the results of a campaign. That’s a problem when advertisers want to compare performance across platforms.
To illustrate this point, the researchers tested the effect of common ROAS assumptions using data from the retail media network of a large grocery-store chain. They found that seemingly small decisions can make a massive difference—as high as 63 percent, when four different methodological choices were combined.
“When seemingly ordinary, defensible choices move ROAS by 63 percent, that can flip a go to a no-go,” says Gordon.
To improve the consistency of data, the researchers suggest a set of questions that advertisers should ask platforms before working with them.
“When you are spending your ad money, you should be dictating what you want to go into the calculation,” Anderson says.
5. Television advertising may not be worth it
It may be prestigious for a company to run a commercial during the Super Bowl or other high-visibility shows or events. But do the rewards justify the immense cost?
When professor of marketing Anna Tuchman and two collaborators analyzed the effect of TV commercials on sales for more than 200 consumer packaged goods, they found that the impact was often dismal.
Firms in their sample spent a median of $10.5 million per year on commercials for each product. But the return on investment for television advertisements was negative for more than 80 percent of the products tested.
They also found that the median advertising elasticity—how much sales would increase if a firm doubled its television advertising—was a mere one percent, far lower than earlier estimates.
Tuchman speculates that consumers today might not pay as much attention to TV ads. Because many people now read their phone or tablet during commercial breaks, viewers may often be exposed to an ad, “but you didn’t actually even notice it because you were so absorbed in your phone,” Tuchman says.
“It looks like firms are really overadvertising, and they would be better off reducing their advertising spending,” she concludes.