Using Nostalgia to Market the Future
Super Bowl Sunday is a great day to kick back with your friends and family while loading up on chips, chicken wings, and a cool beverage to watch the best of the best ads. And there’s some football in between the ads too.
You don’t have to be a marketing guru to know that the Super Bowl is THE event in television advertising. And any marketer knows they’ve truly made it when they get to work on an ad that will air during America’s most-anticipated, highest-grossing sporting event. Each year, some trends emerge that are reflected across most of the Super Bowl ad line-up as they compete for the attention of American consumers. Last year, many advertisers tried to keep things light and optimistic as we looked toward a brighter future with the rollout of Covid vaccines suggesting that the end of the pandemic was near. Companies like BudLight touched on the unpredictability of the previous year with an amusing “when life gives you lemons” storyline, Oatly ran their “oh wow no cow” commercial featuring their CEO standing in a field playing a silly jingle that generally just felt odd and, naturally, went viral, and the “GOAT” Tom Brady and his former teammate Rob Gronkowski were recruited to showcase the importance of working with T-Mobile, “The GOAT in 5G.”
This year, there was still a significant focus on the future but it was heavily geared toward advances in technology like access to the metaverse, cryptocurrency, and electric vehicles. Many advertisers also chose to take their futuristic products to market by tapping into consumers’ nostalgia.Coinbase’s interactive QR code game-like ad that had viewers jumping up from the couch to scan the QR code floating across their TV screen, for example, incorporated an interesting dog-whistle style reference to the bouncing DVD logo that some of us may recall being mesmerized by back when we actually watched movies on DVD.
The commercial was so highly engaged with that, allegedly, it even caused Coinbase’s website to crash. Other cryptocurrency companies like FTX also traveled back in time to market a futuristic product as they enlisted Larry David to play a man who is always wrong about inventions that are going to be “the next big thing” and shoots down the idea of cryptocurrency in the end.
In a sea of advertisements that, only a few years ago, might have sounded like they were marketing works of science fiction there were, however, a few companies that really just stuck to their nostalgia. Many of these companies were golden oldies that haven’t really changed much over the years like Lay’s potato chips that re-entered the Super Bowl ad scene with their first commercial in 17 years entitled “Golden Memories.” Featuring Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen, the one-minute ad showed the two “bros” reminiscing over good times spent together in the past — each recalled event featuring a bag of Lays potato chips, of course — before Rogen moved on to the next chapter of his life, marked by him marrying the ghost that haunted his new house (which felt a bit of random, but pretty on par with the type of comedy we’d expect to see with this duo of actors).
It’s hard to say what the best commercial was this year, but Rocket Homes and Rocket Mortgage’s “Dream House with Anna Kendrick and Barbie” is the highest-rated according to the USA TODAY Ad Meter. I wouldn’t say that this one aligned with the memorable trends of nostalgia and future-related marketing that emerged from so many of the other ads, but I do think that its divergence from the theme helped it stand out. It also featured a partnership between a couple of iconic companies in a single advertisement, had a generous dose of star power from Anna Kendrick, and made some jokes about the popular culture of house-flipping.
Based on the trends we saw this year in this year’s Super Bowl ads, I think we can expect a lot more marketing of intangible goods like bitcoin, NFTs, and the metaverse that we hadn’t previously seen much mainstream marketing for. It is also likely that we will see lots of improvements to existing products positioned as mind-blowingly cool, like a BMW model so cool that it is the only thing Zeus finds interesting when he retires to Earth after a lifetime on Mount Olympus.
