A History of Marketing / Episode 47
In 1967, a 30-second spot at the very first Super Bowl cost roughly $37,500. This Sunday, for Super Bowl 60, brands are paying upwards of $8 million. That is a price increase of over 20,000%.1
So… Is it still worth it?
For Professor Tim Calkins, who’s spent 22 years studying this exact question, the answer is an emphatic, ‘Yes.’
Since 2005, Calkins has led the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review, where MBA students evaluate every ad that airs during the big game. It’s easy to say which ads are funny. It takes more work to determine which ads will be effective.
In this conversation, we dig into how Super Bowl advertising has evolved: why brands now release their spots weeks early, why the creative has gotten safer as the stakes have climbed higher, and what the tone of these ads reveals about the American economy and political climate.
If you’re planning to watch the game this Sunday (or just the commercials), this conversation will deepen your appreciation for the work that goes into making every second worth $266,667.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
We also talk about Tim’s years managing Kraft Mayo and Miracle Whip (two surprisingly different marketing challenges), and the most common mistakes that marketers make when delivering business presentations. As you’ll hear, Tim is an excellent speaker.
Now here is my conversation with professor Tim Calkins.
Special Thanks:
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
The Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review
Andrew Mitrak: Professor Tim Calkins, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Tim Calkins: Well, thank you. It is great to be here.
Andrew Mitrak: We will be publishing this right before the 2026 Super Bowl, which is Super Bowl 60. I had a lot of fun preparing and researching some of your work and also watching some old classic Super Bowl ads. The reason I wanted to have you on for this conversation is that you started publishing the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review in 2005, so over 20 years now. Can you introduce this project for listeners?
Tim Calkins: This is our 22nd year doing this event. Back in 2005, we began the Super Bowl Ad Review, the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review as we call it. I teach at Kellogg, I teach marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Before I was at Kellogg though, I was at Kraft Foods, and I worked in marketing at Kraft Foods for a number of years. When I was at Kraft Foods, now Kraft Heinz, with my team I would sometimes do an exercise where we would look at Super Bowl ads and try to think about what we could learn from what had happened on the Super Bowl.
When I came over to Kellogg, I thought there was a similar opportunity there to do something around the Super Bowl where we get the Kellogg students evaluating these Super Bowl spots. So the event has now been running for 22 years. The format is always the same. We pull together a panel of Kellogg MBA students. Nowadays it is about 70 or 75 students. As the Super Bowl unfolds, as it plays, the students evaluate all the ads that run.
What makes our panel different from a lot of other panels that are out there is that we are very focused on efficacy. We are trying to think about: will these spots, will these Super Bowl ads, build the business and build the brand? Ultimately that is what Super Bowl advertising is all about. A lot of panels, and a lot of Super Bowl rating things—there are lots of these—they will look at likeability, humor, which one did you like the best, which one was funniest. Our panel, we don’t really do that. That’s not really the question. The question really is, using sort of an analytical framework and process, how do we think about which ones of these will be most effective?
Every year we come up with our ratings. We give a handful of advertisers As, and then Bs, Cs. On occasion, we give out an F if somebody really misses the mark. It is a really fun event, but it also is a lot of work because what you realize being part of it is that there are so many ads that will run on the Super Bowl. There are probably 75 official Super Bowl spots, but then there are all these other things that show up. You have local spots, you have network promo spots for different shows. It is a lot of evaluation that the students do. It ends up being a very draining experience.
Andrew Mitrak: Can you walk me back to the beginning? You mentioned Kraft, which later became Kraft Heinz, which I will follow up on because I want to ask you about that too. When you first started paying attention to Super Bowl ads there, this might be an obvious question, but what stood out to you about Super Bowl ads? Why did you want to pay special attention to Super Bowl ads?
Tim Calkins: Super Bowl ads are really unique things in the world of marketing. What is amazing is they become more and more unique as time has gone by. Even if you go back 25 or 30 years ago—so we are now at Super Bowl 60, so you go back to Super Bowl 25 even—the advertising that was running was really different than normal advertising. What happens on the Super Bowl is a few things. Number one, it is expensive, so the investment is high. Number two, you have a huge audience, so there is a lot of people who are watching it. But also, the expectations are different for a Super Bowl spot.
You can’t turn around and run an ad that you are running on Survivor. You can’t turn around and run that ad on the Super Bowl. For most advertisers, you are creating a special piece of creative just for that event. People expect to see amazing Super Bowl spots. That is the expectation and companies are under a lot of pressure to deliver.
The Framework Behind Super Bowl Advertising
Tim Calkins: The reason it is really interesting to study is that you know that for each one of these advertisers, they are putting forward their best thinking, their best creative talents. This is the pinnacle of their work. So much scrutiny is on these things. Given that, it is fascinating to see what they decide to do. Sometimes they do brilliant things and other times they really miss. But to understand what is happening there and really think about it as a marketer is a really unique opportunity and you can learn a ton.
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned how Super Bowl ads are kind of this unique thing. They are a little different than other ads. When you think about this project of analyzing Super Bowl ads, how does it connect to your broader work in brand and marketing strategy? Do you see these as really closely related where a Super Bowl ad is just the epitome of a brand and a marketing strategy wrapped into 30 or 60 seconds? Or do you feel like this is just a little bit of a different, kind of like a fun side quest that’s related to a brand, but it is a slightly separate, unique, different thing than the rest of the brand itself? How do you frame this work?
Tim Calkins: I think a Super Bowl spot is very much at the heart of everything that I teach. I teach marketing strategy, I teach biomedical marketing, I teach influencer marketing, branding. Across all of those classes where I really spend a lot of time is trying to think about the strategy. What are the choices that companies and brands are making? Are they going after new consumers, for example, or are they going after their current consumers? Are they trying to skew younger? Are they trying to go older? Is it about repositioning a brand, getting people to think differently about it? What are all the choices that companies are making?
So when we look at Super Bowl spots, and I look at a Super Bowl spot, I am really interested in pulling apart the choices that the companies have made. Your first choice: the decision to run an ad on the Super Bowl. Well, that’s a big decision. How is it that the company reached that decision and decided that was a good use of 8, 10, 20, 30 million dollars? That begins there. Then the question is, okay, well what products are they talking about and who do they seem to be going after and what’s the message they are putting forward? All of those are sort of strategic choices that the company is making.
Ultimately it does get down to some creative execution things, and those are fun too. But I think a lot of the heart of a good Super Bowl ad comes from the strategic choices that are made in the development process.
Andrew Mitrak: What is the first Super Bowl ad you yourself remember watching? Were you always interested in Super Bowl ads?
Tim Calkins: Oh, I’ve long followed the Super Bowl. Like everybody, I watched the Super Bowl. As I was growing up and came through college and all of that, I would watch the Super Bowl and you’d watch the advertising, of course, a big part of the event. It was really only when I got to Kraft that I began to look at it with a marketing lens. That is a very different way to evaluate a Super Bowl spot. Beforehand you might be looking at, you know, what’s one of the early ones I remember... the Coke Mean Joe Greene ad that ran, which was one of the great spots.
Or, of course, Apple’s spot that ran back in 1984, these old spots that ran.
But it was very different for me when you begin to think about these as marketing investments and marketing tools. That is where all of a sudden it begins to change how you watch a Super Bowl ad. It is one of the things I try to do as I talk about the Super Bowl, is to get people to look at them a little bit differently. It is so easy for people to pass a quick judgment on a Super Bowl spot. “Oh, that was funny. That was great. That was stupid.” People are very quick to pass judgment on it and nothing to stop them from doing that.
But when you really pull back and try to think about what is happening there, it totally changes how you evaluate it and how you think about it. You just have a lot more respect for the risk of these pieces of advertising and you have a lot of respect for how difficult it is to do. I think to do a great Super Bowl ad is really tough. It is a really difficult thing. So when somebody does it well, you have to have a lot of admiration for that team and really salute them.
When they miss, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s not for a lack of intent or trying and effort. It is something went wrong. Sometimes your heart goes out to them because you are like, “Shoot, I don’t know exactly the people who were working on this, but it did not go well for them.” So I guess it makes you much more empathetic about this advertising when you really understand what is happening.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it is good to be empathetic. It is also kind of fun to dunk on the people who miss and all that, but you got to look at everybody trying their best, marketers taking a high-risk bet and kind of good on them for trying whether it’s a win or a bit of a dud.
Evolution of the Super Bowl Commercial Landscape
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned a few famous ads that I want to ask you about because you mentioned Mean Joe Greene, the Coca-Cola advertisement, which is a lot of fun. And then of course the classic 1984 ad, which is probably the single ad that’s come up on this podcast more than any other advertisement. I kind of see that as sort of a watershed moment for the Super Bowl ad where it was a 60-second spot, big budget, directed by Ridley Scott, released in 1984 and obviously has the tie-in to 1984.
Do you see any other milestones beyond that one in Super Bowl advertising? If you look at moments as the stakes in the Super Bowl have gone up, the prices of an ad have gone up beyond 1984, do you see any other major milestones or inflection points for Super Bowl advertising?
Tim Calkins: People often ask, what turned the Super Bowl into this marketing extravaganza? I think what happened is that it has been a step-by-step process over the years that have really led to this. There have been iconic spots that have run over the years. Mean Joe Greene back in 1980. Apple, that was 1984. Then of course 1993, that was one of the great spots for McDonald’s with Larry Bird and Michael Jordan shooting baskets for a McDonald’s meal. That was one of these great iconic spots, celebrity, the whole thing. That was a really big spot people remember.
The Budweiser Frogs in ‘95. That was another spot that people remember that sticks in the mind.
What really happens here in the Super Bowl is that it is a step-by-step growth and increase in the importance of Super Bowl advertising. Part of what is happening with the Super Bowl growing, what is happening at the same time is that all the other media properties out there are sort of fragmenting. So if you go back 20 years ago, the Super Bowl was a big deal, but a lot of other things were a big deal too. The Academy Awards were huge and people would watch those. The Baseball World Series was huge and people would watch that. The Olympics was huge.
What has happened over the decades is that so many of the other big events, viewership has declined as audiences have fragmented and we have so many choices of things to watch. The one thing that has held up and even grown as the years have gone by is the Super Bowl. Which makes it then more and more important when it comes to companies and brands and when it comes to the advertising because now if you want to reach everybody in the US or a good chunk of people in the US, really the only way you can do that is on the Super Bowl.
The Surging Costs of Super Bowl Spots
Andrew Mitrak: I looked up the price of a Super Bowl ad when they started. A 30-second spot at Super Bowl I (1967) was $37,500 back in 1967 dollars. By the way, that’s from Wikipedia, so I don’t know if it’s 100% accurate, but let’s say that’s the ballpark cost of an ad at that time. Inflation-adjusted about 10x that is $360,000, so more expensive. But that said, today in 2026 the reported cost is about $8 million. So that delta between $360,000 to $8 million, that’s the increase in cost.
That would mainly be attributed to there being no other option. If you want to reach all of America, there are not many other places where you could do that. Would you say that scarcity and the breadth of that reach is what justifies the higher costs that advertisers are paying now versus then?
Tim Calkins: There are a lot of things that go into the price, but certainly the price escalation has been extraordinary for Super Bowl spots. But you know, if I could today buy a Super Bowl spot for the 2035 Super Bowl, if I could do that, if there were a market that would allow that, I would do that because I don’t think the Super Bowl is declining anytime soon.
Why do companies pay so much money? Partly it is the sheer reach of it. It is, if you want to get to a big chunk of the population, the only place you can go. But it is not just that. The other thing that has happened is that a lot of people when they are watching the Super Bowl, they are there, they are watching the advertising. Viewership of the Super Bowl, you might have 110 million people watching the Super Bowl, but the vast majority of those people, they don’t care about the teams and they, in many cases, don’t really care about football either. You just have to watch the Super Bowl though because that’s what everybody’s doing that night.
Nobody counter-programs against the Super Bowl. You are not going to have a piano recital on the night of the Super Bowl. People would say, “What are you doing? You can’t have like a Scrabble party on the night of the Super Bowl. You are not going to do that.” No, everybody’s got to watch it. So people show up there, they are looking forward to seeing the advertising. That’s what they are paying attention to.
The other thing though that is happening is that Super Bowl ads are very symbolic. That is an important aspect of this. If you are a company and you are going to go buy a Super Bowl ad, what happens now is you are going to put of course a big PR push around that and you are going to do all these other activities. You want everybody to know that you are buying a Super Bowl ad. Because what does that say? Well, that says that you believe in your business, you are investing in the business, you are an important company, you’ve got resources. All of that is really valuable for branding and it’s got this symbolic nature to it that is hard to quantify but is very real. So there is lots of stuff that brings people to this moment.
You know one other thing that helps Super Bowl advertising is that the Super Bowl is early in the year. It’s in February. Which you would think, well who cares? But in a way that is really important because most companies, if you are on a calendar year fiscal year—January and February, what do you have? Budgets. You’ve got money. At the beginning of the year. In November, your money was either spent or cut or something happened to it, the money might not be available. But at the beginning of the year, all these companies have big budgets. In many cases they say, “Let’s get the year off to a good start. Let’s get on the Super Bowl. Let’s run this advertising, really give the business a jump start.” And that is going to propel us through the year. That is another factor that kicks in here to make it so valuable for firms.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s a really good point, that timing within the year itself. Because also it sets up a campaign or an idea that you can build on throughout the year as well. If I think of the 1984 ad, at the start of the year, that’s great, 1984. If it was at the end of the year, maybe 1984 is kind of a lame pun. Like, “Oh, we’ve heard 1984,” it just happened over and over. So I think the ads themselves are fresh, it’s a new year, it’s a new idea. This is a campaign that you launch big and can iterate on or call back to throughout the year. So it’s kind of a nice big upfront investment in your brand spend.
Tim Calkins: Well, and you’ll see that a lot of advertisers will use the Super Bowl to launch new campaigns. So that is when they bring out the new advertising. And then they follow it up. Either they take that Super Bowl spot and run it again, either as is or in a shorter format, or they extend the campaign idea and bring other executions around the same creative look and feel. You sort of put it in the mind originally on the one Super Bowl, the one big event, and then come back to reinforce that and to get some repetition. They do that in the subsequent months.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that companies measure the impact of their Super Bowl ads differently than they do other ads? Do they measure ROI in terms of different types of uplift versus some other type of ad? Any thoughts on, you know, they spent $8 million on these ads, how are they measuring the ROI on that?
Tim Calkins: Measurement of Super Bowl ads is really tough. It is really difficult to do. What happens is that every company is measuring the impact. You are not going to go invest 8, 10, 20 million dollars and not try to figure out the impact. The problem is that it is not easy to measure the financial impact of a Super Bowl spot. Some things are easy to measure. You can measure website traffic and you can figure out if anybody came to your website. You can look at search terms, did anybody do that. If you are selling an app, you can look at how many downloads did you get and what happened there. If you’re relying on influencers, you can see what kind of activity. So you can look at a lot of these diagnostic metrics.
You can also ask people, do they remember your Super Bowl ad, did they like it? All of those, that’s all easy to measure. But financially, it is very hard to put numbers around it. The big problem is that valuing a brand financially is... people try to do it, but it is a very imprecise science. So in theory, if you get out there and run an ad on the Super Bowl, and if it’s a great piece of advertising, at the end of the day people will think better of your brand than they did before. They will have more positive associations with your brand and they might either know of it for the first time or have some... but it helped the brand.
The problem is you can’t quantify the financial value of that. I can quantify how many people came to my website and things like that, but that’s a very small part of it. You are never going to justify a Super Bowl ad based on those kind of metrics. You are going to do it for the brand value and for the long-term impact that it is going to have.
I have come to believe there is one way to know though if a company is happy with their Super Bowl ad. The one way you know for sure is whether they come back to do it again. Because you know that if a company runs an ad on the Super Bowl and then the next year they don’t, well then you know that clearly they didn’t think or they had questions about the efficacy of that. But if they come back and they do it again, then you know something.
Sometimes you’ll see advertisers, they will run on the Super Bowl for a number of years and then they don’t. And then the question is, what happens next? Somebody like WeatherTech. They ran for many years, but then they took a year off. And then they came back. What that tells you is that they clearly thought that they were benefiting from the Super Bowl spot. And when they stopped doing it, they saw the problem.
Andrew Mitrak: Sorry, which company was that? WeatherTech?
Tim Calkins: WeatherTech. Yeah, so WeatherTech, they do floor mats. Very strange company. It’s a private company. And they have been running on the Super Bowl though for many years. They are back in 2026. They ran in 2025. I believe they did not run in 2024. But they ran ‘23, ‘22, ‘21, ‘20. But then you know.
Some brands have been back and they have run for just many, many years. TurboTax has run, this will be their 13th year running on the Super Bowl. And you are like, wow. Squarespace, 12th year coming up. Michelob Ultra, 9th year. What you know is that these companies have clearly thought about this and have clearly decided that the Super Bowl is a good investment for their brand.
Why Major Brands Left the Super Bowl
Andrew Mitrak: I’ll keep a closer eye out for WeatherTech; I hadn’t heard of that brand, but I’ll be watching for their ad as well. Are there any certain brands that you’ve noticed that left and stayed out? Do you think there are brands that said, “Hey, the way we win is by not playing,” and just chose to opt out of the Super Bowl? Are there any examples that come to mind of not because they went out of business or aren’t a successful company anymore, but they just choose to opt out of the Super Bowl?
Tim Calkins: Oh sure, a lot of companies have. They come and go as Super Bowl advertisers. One of the great Super Bowl advertisers for many, many years was FedEx. FedEx eventually stopped running on the Super Bowl, and we haven’t seen them in recent years. They made the decision not to do that.
Then there are other brands that really found magic on the Super Bowl and then stopped. Somebody like CareerBuilder. You might remember them; they ran some Super Bowl ads that were really distinctive with chimps. They had these chimpanzees, and it was these very funny spots about the workplace environment and, “Do you work with a bunch of monkeys?” I think was the thing. Maybe you should get a new job, and CareerBuilder was going to be a place to go find your new job. They eventually stopped running on the Super Bowl. There were a lot of reasons why.
It is interesting, though, for a brand like that, you stop running on the Super Bowl, and then you do begin to see an erosion in brand awareness. Clearly, I haven’t seen their numbers, but clearly, that brand was top of mind when they were a big Super Bowl advertiser, and that is not the case at this point.
Andrew Mitrak: I wonder which one preceded which. For CareerBuilder, it’s interesting because others have taken up the space, like Monster.com or obviously LinkedIn and other tools are massive within it. I wonder if CareerBuilder, if they don’t advertise in the Super Bowl because their budgets went down because of their impact, or if they stopped advertising in the Super Bowl and then therefore they kind of lost some market share and it was sort of a downward spiral from there. I wonder which one preceded which.
Tim Calkins: My understanding of the story on that was actually sort of interesting. They were using the chimps, which were super memorable and distinctive Super Bowl ads, but then they got a lot of pushback from the animal rights activists who said it’s totally inappropriate to be using the chimps. They were very targeted. Some of the activists were very targeted and went after some of the senior executives at the company. The company eventually said, “We can’t really use the chimps. We’ve got to do something else creatively.”
When they did that, though, what they found was that it was very tough to come up with a great Super Bowl spot. So they ran a couple of years, but they did not get anywhere near the distinctiveness or the lift that they had before. Then I think they said, “It’s a lot of money, the creative doesn’t seem to be working here, doesn’t make sense to keep doing this.” And then they backed away.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I guess if you’re going to use the animals, use something like frogs that work better as puppets or CGI or whatever Budweiser uses versus the real chimps.
Tim Calkins: Yeah. I mean, the good news now, I guess, is Generative AI can create whatever we want right now.
From Single Super Bowl Spots to Integrated Campaigns
Andrew Mitrak: Exactly. Aside from the advertisements getting more expensive, over the course of the last 20 years since you’ve been—22 years now since you’ve been running this—have you noticed the ads themselves change themselves or the nature of Super Bowl advertising? How has the nature of Super Bowl advertising evolved since you’ve really started paying attention to Super Bowl ads?
Tim Calkins: So it’s changed a lot. One of the big things that has changed is that more and more Super Bowl advertising isn’t just about the Super Bowl ad; it is about the whole integrated campaign. I think there are two factors behind this. One is the investments have become enormous, and so companies want to maximize the return on investment to make the most of the opportunity. The other thing, though, that’s available is now there are so many other digital tools that are available.
You go back 20 years ago, and we didn’t have Instagram and Facebook and TikTok to play with. All of that has emerged over the years. Now what you see is companies put forward incredibly elaborate, integrated marketing campaigns around the Super Bowl. For most of these companies, it becomes a three-week—really a two-to-three-week—marketing push where they try to hit every lever during those two or three weeks. They pull out the PR campaigns and the influencer efforts and all of this different activity to try to make the most of it. So that’s, I think, really different. That’s one thing that’s changed.
Why Brands Release Ads Before the Game
Tim Calkins: Related to that, another change that we’ve seen is that more and more of these companies now release the spots ahead of time. It used to be that the vast majority of Super Bowl ads would run on the Super Bowl, and that was the first time you would see them. Now, the majority of advertisers—the vast majority—will release the ads ahead of time. They’ll release them either the week before the Super Bowl or maybe two weeks in advance, but they get those spots out there ahead of time. There are lots of reasons to do that, by the way. That is the best practice. That’s a big change that we have seen. There’s a lot behind that we could go into.
Andrew Mitrak: What are the reasons you would release your Super Bowl ad before the big ball game? You’d think like, “Hey, I want to make a big splash all at once. Let’s kind of hold the dry powder and go big all at once.” But is there some strategy to releasing beforehand?
Tim Calkins: Oh, there are a lot of reasons to release a Super Bowl ad ahead of time. One of the big ones is that there’s just more time. So if you put your spot out there a week in advance, you’ve got a lot of time to generate viewership and to get views of it before the Super Bowl even happens. The Super Bowl goes by really quickly.
The other thing that happens is as an advertiser, the Super Bowl is very unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe it’ll be a blowout and you’re running in the third quarter and nobody’s watching anymore. Maybe what happens is a different advertiser runs a spot right in front of you that is uproariously funny, and that overshadows your spot. Maybe the creative idea that you’ve embraced is copied by another company, and they’ve got the same sort of idea.
These are all unknowable, unpredictable things. How do you hedge that? You get out ahead of time and try to get some viewership before the game even begins.
Another big one, and maybe I think the most important one, is you know ahead of time if you have a problem. So on the Super Bowl, there is so much attention and viewership that it’s terrifying for companies because if you make a mistake and you run a spot that people find—even a small group of people—if they find it inappropriate or offensive or something like that, it can turn into a massive problem for the company. How do you avoid, how do you minimize that risk? If you release the spot early, there is time for people to come back and say, “Wait, that doesn’t look right,” and then you can fix it before the Super Bowl goes and before you offend millions and millions of people.
So there are lots of reasons at the end of the day to get that spot out there. Holding it back for the surprise, you’ll see some advertisers do that, but that is not a common approach anymore. The stakes are too high. It’s too risky. There’s too much money involved. It makes a lot of sense to release it ahead of time.
The Rise of QR Codes and Digital Calls to Action
Andrew Mitrak: The other change that I’ve seen probably in the last 5 to 10 years or so is the ads themselves having more distinct calls to action or digital experience within it. The QR code... I can’t remember which company it was that just had a kind of bouncing QR code on their ad for 30 seconds.
Or ones where there’s also one from a year or two ago where it was just a big long URL or some secret code to enter in an app, and you had to find all the letters and type it all in.
So it seems like there are more and more—in addition to being aware of the digital surround or pre-releasing on social media or on YouTube in advance—there’s also on the ad itself having more direct calls to action and making the ad more interactive itself. Is that kind of a trend you’ve been paying attention to?
Tim Calkins: Well, there’s no question that companies are trying to leverage technology and take advantage of that. Whether it’s the QR codes that you see on some of these spots or on other platforms, you see that I think more and more.
Super Bowl Ads as a Mirror of the US Economy and Politics
Tim Calkins: There are two other really interesting things to watch for, though, on the Super Bowl. One thing is who shows up and who advertises. And that’s a really interesting question. It tells you something about the economy. Because to go on the Super Bowl and run an ad, that means that you’ve got resources and money and you have a certain amount of optimism about the future. If you’re worried about saving money, if you think your company is going to be having some hard times, you wouldn’t run a Super Bowl ad. Those are the companies that are feeling good. So it’s very interesting to watch that and to see who shows up.
The other thing is to watch the tonality of the Super Bowl spot. I think you can really learn something about the US economy and how people are feeling if you really look at Super Bowl ads. Because all of these companies, they study the environment, they study how people are feeling, they come up with creative design to resonate with people. So what these companies see is a really interesting look at what’s happening within the country. And you can really see that happen in many ways.
You know, actually if you look even when it comes to politics, you can see trends develop there. So if you go back, what was it now, a year and a half ago to the... Was it a year and a half ago? Before the election. Yes. But if you go back and if you... The question was who was going to win? Would Joe Biden pull it off and his group and the Democrats, or would Donald Trump come back?
But you go back and you look at the advertising that was running on the Super Bowl that year, and there was a real tone to some of the spots around people feeling that it was tough in the economy, it’s tough to move forward, it’s tough to get ahead. What you could see there, there was a real sentiment that people were not feeling good about how things were going. They weren’t feeling good about their futures.
And when you look at that in hindsight, you’re like, “Shoot, there it is.” If people are really feeling that way, that is a very difficult time for an incumbent or an incumbent administration, an incumbent party, to get the win. And you just look at it and you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s interesting.” So it’s always fun to watch what’s the tonality.
Last year on the Super Bowl was interesting. We saw a lot of traditional values on the Super Bowl. What did we see? People in traditional families. People at the cul-de-sac. What did we not see? You don’t see people at the club. You don’t see people in an urban environment. You don’t see super diverse groups of people. Last year we saw this real sort of pivot to these traditional kind of values, which again, I think just reflected a little bit of where the country is at the moment. So the Super Bowl, it’s really fascinating to watch what people run and what’s the tonality.
Are We Past the Era of “Peak Super Bowl” Creative?
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that we’re past peak Super Bowl at all? I mean, you mentioned how you’d still... if you could buy an ad for 10 years ago at today’s price, you would do it. But also if I look up lists of the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time, there aren’t that many that are from the last five years or so that make the list. Like I looked up one that had a hundred or so ads, and the most recent ones were kind of clustered around 2010.
There was “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“ from Old Spice.
There’s “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry,” the Snickers one that really revitalized the last decade or so of Betty White‘s career.
Then there’s “Parisian Love” from Google, which is an ad that I love.
And those were all from around 2010, I think, which was 16 years ago at this point.
Do you think that’s maybe just bias against recent ads and they just need more time to sort of marinate and be part of the culture? Or do you think there was something from, you know, 15, 16 years ago that made ads more memorable than they might be today?
Tim Calkins: So I don’t think we’re at peak Super Bowl because the trends that have made the Super Bowl so powerful are still very much intact. You’re seeing the Super Bowl as an event remain incredibly important, and viewership is solid—viewership has been up in the past few years—and other options are beginning to fragment.
It is true that some of the most memorable Super Bowl ads are older ones. I think that’s true, though, for a couple of reasons. One, I think, is that there’s no question that Super Bowl advertisers have to play it pretty safe. And more and more it’s become true that taking a big risk on the Super Bowl, creatively or otherwise, is really pretty dangerous to careers. And not sure you want to do that. So that may be one reason.
But the other reason, I think, is that the overall standard of the Super Bowl spots is getting better and better. So when we began our whole journey on the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review, each year there would be some that were just really not good pieces of advertising. And now that seems to be less the case. It just feels like the overall average quality of this advertising is getting better and better.
But I will say one thing you can be very confident of—I’m going to make one prediction for the Super Bowl this year—afterwards, people will say, “You know, the advertising just not as good as I remember.” And they’re going to say that. But they always say that because what happens? In our minds, we remember a few iconic spots. We remember Larry Bird. We remember the first of the E-Trade babies. We remember that Apple spot.
What we forget is that there were like 500 other pieces of advertising that ran over that period. So our memories, we’re picking out the highlights of the past 20 years and comparing this year’s collection of advertising to the highlight reel. That’s not a fair comparison. It’s a little bit like having a football team play the All-Star team. I mean, it’s just not...But people will say that because they always say that.
The one thing that might be a problem though for Super Bowl uh as a as a platform I think is streaming and how that unfolds. So you know right now there’s sort of the network broadcast you can stream the Super Bowl. The interesting thing is it’s not a given. My understanding is it’s not a given that the same advertising will run. And if I were in charge of the Super Bowl as a media property, I would insist that the same spots run on both because that way the advertising is seen by everybody and it can be the basis of conversation.
Where the Super Bowl begins to lose its punch to fragment like everything else is fragmented. And then instead of getting this big pop of a hundred million viewers, you start getting, you know, 20 million that maybe saw your spot on streaming or 60 million that maybe saw your spot on the network broadcast. And then I think you begin to ruin the Super Bowl as a big event that advertisers are worth really focusing on. That’s the biggest watch out. I have to think people will be smart enough not to get caught in that, but I do I do wonder if that could be a problem longer term.
Are High Costs and Risk Aversion Killing Creativity?
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned a lot of great points there, and one that I want to come back to is that advertisers are somewhat risk-averse with a Super Bowl ad, that you want to avoid being too controversial. I wonder if that’s partly just because of getting more expensive as well? Or it also is somewhat mirroring the phenomenon that we’ve seen in the movies, where movies are more and more—as movie budgets get more expensive—you see more Avengers type movies that try to appeal to everybody. You try to see the superhero movie that appeals to everybody, relatively inoffensive.
In the meantime, comedies—there’s almost no comedies in theaters anymore. What is comedy? It’s somewhat controversial in a way. And if I think of “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” the Old Spice ad, kind of a weird ad. Really funny, but kind of a strange ad and pretty risky too. Or “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.” People tackling an old 90-year-old Betty White, also a pretty risky ad in some ways, pretty funny. And I don’t know if that ad would get greenlit today or get approved today in the same way because it’s kind of weird. It’s kind of risky.
I wonder if some combination of needing to appeal more as the prices get higher, really wanting to avoid too much risk if that kind of is all playing into why some of the ads might be a little less funny today as well. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Tim Calkins: I think there’s no question that companies are very careful with what they’re running right now, and that does impact the creative. It’s partly financial, but I think it goes way beyond the financial aspects. The thing to remember is that Super Bowl ads get so much scrutiny, and everybody knows they’re expensive, and everybody’s got an opinion.
So if you’re the CEO of a company, you know what you don’t want to have to deal with on the Monday after the Super Bowl? Is having to explain to everybody why did your company run that really either offensive, ineffective—call it what you will—piece of advertising. And I think a lot of companies and marketers will say, “We don’t want that kind of scrutiny. That’s a reason not to go on the Super Bowl.” You’ve got to be pretty brave to advertise on the Super Bowl, to be honest. And I think if you are on the Super Bowl, there’s still a desire to play it safe.
I mean, I guess the advertisers, I suppose, it’s not that different than the players on the teams. And the teams always have to balance how risky do you want to play and how conservative do you want to be. And the advertisers are working with that same set of questions.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s a really interesting tightrope to walk because you need to be risky enough that you’re able to break through and justify your spend and not be too boring. But also, if you are too risky, you can wind up really shooting yourself in the foot. I empathize a lot with these advertisers and everybody behind the budget and the approvals on it because you don’t want to make the wrong choice there.
Tim Calkins: Just imagine the process of developing a Super Bowl spot and how tough that is to navigate. Begin with the fact you have all these hierarchies within companies. If the vice president likes something, but the senior vice president doesn’t, you have that dynamic. But then they are all working with the outside firms as well. So an advertising firm will come in and say, “This is going to be just an incredible idea. This idea we have is so creative and unexpected. It’s going to be the best.”
But then the brand leader has to say, “Is that really the case or not?” If they don’t think it is, then you have to tell the creative person that it is not the creative idea they think it is. And the creative person is like, “No, I’m the creative person here, and you are not thinking big enough.” Then the brand person is like, “Yeah, but it is my brand and I don’t want to run something that creative.” But then the senior person says, “Oh, I think we should.” Just the complexity of it all is really tough to figure out. How do you end up with the creative idea that is going to run?
Andrew Mitrak: It’s almost a miracle that anything gets shipped at all.
Have You Ever Purchased A Product Because of a Super Bowl Ad?
Andrew Mitrak: So just wrapping up with the Super Bowl, I wanted to ask you, have you ever made a purchase or changed your buying behavior because of a Super Bowl ad influencing you?
Tim Calkins: The answer to that is yes, of course. Now, if you want me to pick exactly the example that I had, that is more difficult. That is a tough one. What did I buy? I did love the Kia Telluride spot that ran. That was an amazing piece of advertising.
Andrew Mitrak: I was going to bring Kia up because I have an anecdote. I have a Telluride that is sitting in my driveway right over there. I had never heard of a Telluride before, and I had never even considered buying a Kia before. But I saw that super bowl ad and thought, “Wow, that actually looks like a pretty cool SUV. That is a Kia? Telluride?”
I was driving a Prius, and then my second daughter arrived some time after the Super Bowl. I tried to drive my whole family home and thought, “Wow, this car is really cramped. I’ve got to upgrade.” I just started looking at reports of SUVs and I thought, “Oh, Telluride. That is well reviewed. Oh, I remember that Super Bowl ad.”
I didn’t just see the ad and go to the dealer the next day, but it certainly made it cool. It gave Kia a little more brand equity where they used to be a punchline of a car manufacturer in some ways. In fact, I think The Simpsons and Principal Skinner would drive a Kia and it was a joke. It was kind of disparaging.
Now it is a lot cooler. I think part of that—not the only thing, it is not a silver bullet—but part of that is that they advertise in the Super Bowl and they really try to use that as a mechanism to build awareness and reposition their brand.
Tim Calkins: I think it is an example of just a really effective Super Bowl spot they ran. Very risky. That was one, “We are not heroes.” We are an amazing Super Bowl ad. You look at the spot and all of a sudden, shoot, maybe I should think about a Kia. Maybe I should think about a Telluride. That is the power of it.
It is one of the things in marketing that I think people in general have to be careful of. When you ask people, “What brought you here today?” or “Why are you buying this product?” or anything like that, it is important to remember that people will never tell you it was the advertising. They will never say that. Or very rarely they will say that. They will say, “Oh, it was word-of-mouth marketing.” Or, “I saw something else.” Or, “I heard about it on...”
People say that partly because if you say, “Oh, I bought this product because of the advertising,” it makes you look like somebody who is not thinking fully. You can be persuaded by advertising. Who is persuaded by advertising? So people don’t volunteer that. But there is no question that advertising done well has an impact on how we make decisions and how we evaluate products and services. Absolutely.
Lessons from Managing Brands at Kraft Foods
Andrew Mitrak: With our remaining time, I wanted to ask you a few questions outside of just the Super Bowl. You mentioned Kraft Foods. You managed brands at Kraft Foods. I’m wondering just broadly, what did you learn from working at Kraft Foods?
Tim Calkins: Oh, I learned so much about teams, businesses, consumers, and marketing. It was just a terrific training ground for marketing. It really launched my marketing career. Even now when I teach at Kellogg, I look back to those days working on these brands to try to think about it.
What were some of the big things though? One of the things was just the challenge of delivering business results. Until you have been there and see the pressure of it, it is hard to quite understand exactly how that works. Just the need to bring in the results.
The other thing that is really interesting is trying to understand your consumers and figure out great communication—figure out how to talk to them in a way that will resonate. That is just really interesting and complicated. It is really fun because to do that well, you have to get in there and try to think about what is important to people. What are their values? What are the insights that motivate their life? When you do it well, you can come up with advertising and marketing efforts that really are incredibly powerful. They connect with what people value, think about, and care about.
But it is all hard because people don’t necessarily tell you what they care about or what they think about. Often people don’t even know what they really care about. It is interesting; people can’t express it sometimes. So that was fascinating, to understand and think about how you develop great pieces of communication. That was a big one as well.
Then there was a huge piece around working cross-functionally. On all those businesses, there are a lot of different things that have to come together. There is an operations side of things, a sales effort, a finance effort, market research, advertising, and promotions. Pulling together the team and getting the team organized, aligned, and working cohesively is really fun, but also challenging to do. That is the key though for any business. Unless everybody—all the different functions—are working together, it is really hard to get things moving forward in an organized fashion.
Brand Management: Kraft Mayo vs. Miracle Whip
Andrew Mitrak: I noticed on your CV you went from being brand manager on Kraft Mayo to senior brand manager on Miracle Whip. It just seemed like kind of funny consumer bases to market to back-to-back. I’m wondering if there was anything that you noticed jumping from one product to the next, advertising Mayo versus advertising Miracle Whip? Because they are brands that are so familiar. You see them in the grocery store every time. I see these. I imagine that there is probably some passionate consumer bases behind them. So do you want to kind of compare and contrast marketing those two products?
Tim Calkins: One of the great things about working on these products is you realize once you get in there just how different they are. You think about Kraft Mayonnaise and Miracle Whip and you are like, “Well, how different can they be?” They are both viscous products that come in the same jar, sold at a similar price point with similar usage behaviors.
But then you get in there and you realize they are totally different. Kraft Mayonnaise is a decent mayonnaise. But we were going up against Hellmann’s and Best Foods. At the time it was Unilever. Huge company, huge budgets, dominant market share. So we were sort of the scrappy little brand. Didn’t have a lot of resources. We had to find some way to scratch our way to some market share and try to keep that business going well.
But then you move over to Miracle Whip. Miracle Whip is totally different. Miracle Whip is this powerhouse of a brand. In certain parts of the country, it is a super high market share. The big thing about Miracle Whip is that it has no competition to speak of. No direct competition. There is a little bit of private label, but Miracle Whip is Miracle Whip.
So that is a totally different marketing challenge. It is around how do you activate your customer base? How do you resonate with people who really like Miracle Whip? It is a super polarizing product. But people who like it, really like it. So you just have to tap in to that consumer group and try to motivate them and try to get them fired up. That becomes the challenge for Miracle Whip.
It’s a really interesting piece. One of the interesting things about Miracle Whip that really helps that brand a lot is it is very tough to define what it is. What is it? You are like, “Well, it is a mayonnaise.” But then people will be very quick to say, “Well no, it is not mayonnaise.” It is a really different flavor than mayonnaise. If you like mayonnaise, you are probably not going to like Miracle Whip and vice versa. So you can’t call it a mayonnaise.
It is technically a salad dressing. That is the technical standard. But what is a salad dressing? What do you do with salad dressing? You put it on salad. So if you wanted to compete with Miracle Whip, I guess you would launch a salad dressing. But what do you do with salad dressing? You put it on salad. And what do you do with Miracle Whip? Well, you put it on a sandwich. So then maybe you are going to launch sandwich dressing. But what is a sandwich dressing? I don’t even know what that is. So Miracle Whip is just a totally interesting product. Makes a ton of money. No real competition. But so different than Kraft Mayonnaise.
Becoming a Better Business Presenter
Andrew Mitrak: I also want to ask you about presentations. You’ve spoken a lot about this. You are obviously a great presenter yourself. You wrote a book called “How to Wash a Chicken,” all about presenting. My question to you is, what do marketers most often get wrong about business presentations?
Tim Calkins: Presenting well is so important in the world of business because that is how you have an impact. That is how you get your recommendations put forward. What marketers get wrong about presenting, I think, sometimes they make things just way too complicated.
The thing about the world today, especially in marketing, is that there is so much data. There is so much information that is available. So it is very easy to end up with a presentation or a recommendation that is very clunky, full of studies, full of data, full of analytics, full of all of this information. But ultimately, that doesn’t lead to a really strong recommendation sometimes.
I think the challenge today is: How do you take all this information that we have and figure out which information really matters? And then, how do you lay it out in such a way that people can really follow the story? They can see the narrative and they can begin to understand what is happening on a business.
Marketing is all about action, all about moving forward. It is about recommendations: “Here is what we should do next.” To get there, you have to take people on this journey from where we are today to how that plan forward is going to be the best path. To do that, you really have to think about all the results we are looking at today, all the information, all this data, and how does all of that get us to the recommendation of where we want to go forward? That, I think, is the role of the presentation.
Andrew Mitrak: One of my tactics for presentations is I try to keep my presentations themselves pretty short, like 10 slides or fewer, but then I have a really long appendix. I kind of preempt because when I present—especially if I think of ones where I am presenting to a cross-functional team, we might have to influence somehow, or an executive I need to persuade—often they might even interrupt and start asking questions immediately. I want to show that I am prepared and jump to an appendix, but also not have all that information upfront because then, to your point, it becomes cluttered. There are too many different things.
Is my thinking about that the right way? Of just showing my homework in the back end but keeping it tight upfront? Or do you have any other tactics or tips along those lines?
Tim Calkins: The question I would always ask is: What will your audience need or want to see? So anytime you are doing a presentation, one of the first things you have to do is think about who are you presenting to. You think about what do they like and what are they going to want to see. If I am presenting to somebody and if I know that they are going to want to see a five-year P&L for the business, well then I am going to proactively go ahead and put that in because I just know they are going to be looking for that.
So I think that is a really important step, to think about your audience and then make sure you deliver against what they are doing. Ideally, when you are doing a presentation, you don’t end up going to the appendix. Ideally. Because if you have really done it well, I think you have a sense about what is going to be the next question they are likely to ask, and then you try to address it there.
An appendix is good to have though, in case you do get questions from out of the blue. Especially sometimes with cross-functional people who might ask something, and then some of that stuff might end up in the appendix. So I think it can be a really useful thing to have along with you. The bulk of the presentation though, that is always the question about: Okay, what do I need to put in here and what is all the stuff I can take out?
The Importance of Narrative Over Delivery
Andrew Mitrak: In my work as a marketer, I would say I spend more time making business presentations and presenting them than I do on actual creativity or actual strategy on marketing. Sure, there is strategy that sometimes comes up in the course of making a presentation. If you are presenting the strategy, you have to have done the strategy beforehand. But I spend a lot of time in slides and making them and presenting.
But also, if you look at the time I spent in school sort of learning presentations versus the time I spent on all the other stuff, I probably underinvested in learning presentation skills upfront. Is that a pattern that you see as a professor? That generally speaking, we underinvest in teaching marketers presentation skills?
Tim Calkins: Well, I think it goes beyond marketers. I think generally speaking, we do a very poor job in the world of business preparing people to put together good presentations. And there are lots of reasons for that. Part of it is that that doesn’t fall into anybody’s responsibility area. It is not the finance department’s—the finance department isn’t going to teach people to write a presentation. And the marketing department isn’t going to teach that. And the accounting department is not going to teach that. And the leadership group... Nobody really teaches it. Or few people. There are some communications folks you will see who work on it.
The other thing I see is though that very often when we do teach people how to put together a good presentation, we end up focusing very much on the delivery. We spend a lot of time teaching people how do you use hand gestures appropriately, and how do you move around a room, and how do you speak in a forceful voice, and things like that. It is the execution, the delivery. Which in my mind is fine, that is good, I think that is all great stuff.
But the real opportunity is before that. It is: How do you put together the recommendation? How do you lay out the story? How do you work with your data and turn the data into a logical story that leads to your recommendation? That is the part that is not really taught very well, in my experience. And it is something that doesn’t come naturally to people.
It is also something that generative artificial intelligence doesn’t do well. Generative AI will produce a list of pros and cons for you, and it can create a PowerPoint page showing a list of points or bullets, but it doesn’t really build a great narrative that leads you to this recommendation about where we want to go. That is the value add.
I actually think if you write—if you put together a great presentation—the delivery becomes really easy. Because the presentation almost does itself. Back when I was at Kraft, I would remember sometimes we would put together this really complicated recommendation presentation. And then we would send the summer intern up to go deliver the presentation. And the summer intern would be like, “What? I can’t.” You are like, “No, it will be fine.” The slides were good enough and the story basically just goes through it. It is just going to tell itself.
But all that work gets done before the meeting begins. And I think that is the opportunity for people, is to really think about how do you put together these stories, how do you lay out stuff that makes a lot of sense. If you do that well, the rest of it is going to take care of itself.
Andrew Mitrak: Professor Tim Calkins, I really enjoyed this conversation. It was so fun to revisit Super Bowl ads. I know I am much more prepared for the big game on Sunday. And also it inspired me to brush up on my presentation skills as well. So as we wrap up, where can listeners read more and find you online?
Tim Calkins: My website and sort of my blog and my newsletter, timcalkins.com. Also on TikTok, you can find me at marketingprof_tim. So I’m out there posting a little bit on TikTok these days around Super Bowl spots and presenting and all of that.
Andrew Mitrak: That is awesome. We will be sure to paste links to those in the blog that accompanies this post. So Professor Tim Calkins, thanks again so much for your time. I had a lot of fun.
Tim Calkins: All right, Andrew. Thank you. That was great fun.
$37,500 in 1967 dollars is roughly $360,000 adjusted for inflation. So in inflation-adjusted terms the increase in Super Bowl ad costs would be closer to 2,100%. Please forgive a marketer for choosing the bigger number for my intro.
