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What’s the recipe for unprecedented ad success? Hire the world’s biggest pop star, wearing a Pepsi-brand outfit (plus belly button ring, natch), and give her a song and dance to a catchy jingle. Spears’ seminal 2001 Pepsi ad was more a full-scale music video than a commercial, sharp choreography included. It even featured a cheeky cameo from one-time presidential hopeful Bob Dole and heralded a new era of matching musical talent with mass-market products.
Voted the best Super Bowl commercial of all-time in 2011 by readers of Advertising Age, Coke’s “Hey Kid, Catch” told a full, heartstrings-pulling story in 60 seconds while setting the standard for featuring sports celebrities in commercials. The 1980 ad was so popular that the following year NBC released The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid, an hour-long TV movie based on the ad, in which “Mean” Joe Greene adopts a 9-year-old boy. Multiple versions of the ad were created for international audiences, some featuring soccer stars like Diego Maradona.
One of the most well-known ads in Super Bowl history, this Budweiser commercial helped prove the enduring power of a catchphrase. As with Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” before it, the “budwei-ser” slogan permeated consumer culture and helped the campaign survive for years before Bud’s formula evolved. Its trans-state-like delivery only made the message sink in deeper.
E-Trade, a favored online platform for digital day-trading, was one of the first brands to break the fourth wall of Super Bowl ad spending with “Wasted,” a 2000 spot featuring, well, a dancing monkey. The ad was doubly effective in that it ridiculed the immense cost of Super Bowl advertising and its questionable efficacy while simultaneously driving home the brand’s raison d’être: Helping users make the most out of their own money.
The ad textbooks tell you to put the product front and center, to make it inescapable. The point, after all, is to get people interested enough to buy whatever’s being shown. Beer ads, in particular, tend to show some sort of young, college-aged, aspirational lifestyle. But in Budweiser’s “Whassup” ad, the beer is subtle, in the background, almost beside the point. The focus of the ad is dudes being goofy, and it arguably began an entire genre of Super Bowl commercials designed merely to entertain. The “Whassup” phrase was widely parroted by real-life dudes in the days and months afterward while also spawning a number of other “Whassup” Budweiser spots.
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