Jon Evans, chief marketing officer at System1 Group, joins Cheddar News to discuss the key to creating a great Super Bowl ad. 

Between Bells

A Look at What Makes a Successful Super Bowl Ad

And of course we know we're gonna be talking all about the Super Bowl. So join us to offer more insight about how we can expect, what we can expect from the Super Bowl ads? Let's bring in john Evans, chief marketing officer of System One good to have you here. Thanks so much for joining us. So those 32nd spots now costing $6.5 million obviously a ton of pressure to get things right here. Looking back at past years, Which brands do you think won the Super Bowl here? That's a great question where it's fun actually watching your reel from earlier because there were quite a few babies weren't there. And actually last year's winner on our testing, we test every Super Bowl ad and we find out how the public feel about the advert and last year's winner was Huggies. Do you remember all the babies born on Super Bowl day and they managed to put them in the film and it was just the cutest thing and everybody went mad for it. They loved it. It was all about humanity. It was funny, it was touching and I don't think anyone predicted it as well. So there's often a few surprises on the Super Bowl when we do the testing. Obviously there's a lot of work that goes into the creation of these ads, the social media campaign for these ads. The marketing for these ads. But what, what's basically the secret sauce or the formula here for a successful winning, add something that you and I will be talking about for years to come here. Absolutely. Look, the key thing to remember is Super Bowl is about entertainment, right? Were there to enjoy ourselves? It's the biggest show on earth. It's a family event, isn't it? And the key thing is to really entertain people and connect emotionally as well. So we know that advertising that makes us feel something is usually successful, makes us go on and remember it in the future and you know, that can be done through humor. I mean, you remember the g pad from a couple of years ago with Groundhog Day and Bill Murray in it. You know, if we laugh at things, we typically then remember them afterwards as well. So definitely humor, definitely entertainment. And of course, you know, super bowls all about celebrity as well. So, you know, picking a great celebrity that fits your brand. It can be a very, very effective tactic. So get those things right, and you can get some really big successes on the, on Super Bowl. There are some mrs, I mean, look, there are sometimes where Super Bowl ads just completely hit the mark and you're, you're thinking to yourself, you just literally lit, you know, $5.5 million on fire for no reason. What are sort of the traps to sort of avoid here for, for brands? Well, I don't get into trouble with jeep, but you know, we've just seen an amazing g pad, right? They actually didn't get it right last year. I don't know if you remember they had the average Bruce Springsteen, It was called the middle and it was a little bit of a political statement about divisions in America and finding the middle ground. And I think the thing is, people don't want to be reminded of serious topics when they're watching the Super Bowl. It should be lighthearted, it should be fun, it should be engaging. So I think in this case they didn't quite hit the mark and it was one of the lowest performing. Another, another one that didn't quite hit the mark was only as well. I don't remember. They had their founder walking through a field singing a very strange song about oat milk. And it just, you know, the tone wasn't quite right and I'm not sure everyone quite appreciated the joke. So yeah, there are definitely some misses. But keep it lighthearted, keep it entertaining and you'll do well. The other thing that's sort of interesting here is sort of the rollout because a lot of these ads now are coming out earlier and earlier. I mean, I just mentioned, I mean today, you know, Planet Fitness released their Lindsay Lohan ad, that's clearly going to run during the Super Bowl. I mean, is that smart to release these ads early when you're spending $6 million dollars to air it on the Super Bowl. Is it even worth it then at that point. Well, it's so interesting because like you're spending so much money on the spot itself, I guess companies are desperate to try and create as much hype as they possibly can in the lead up to it. It's a massive investment, $6.5 million now. It's interesting actually because we research and we test the teasers as well as the actual films on on on the night. And what we find is that teasers don't tend to do that well because they're so they were so kind of limited in what they say that we often find they don't score very well. So the teasers are more about social media and more about getting people to start, you know, start talking before game like but I would say there is there is a couple of great exceptions this year and I don't know if you've caught the Enfamil commercial but they've actually film the baby's born in advance that were due on 13 February, that's been have been born in advance and it's a bit like the Huggies ad from last year. I mean you can't go wrong, you know, showing you know, showing babies, but the genius of that is they've managed to get people talking about them in advance actually, they're actually saying in their commercial, we're not gonna be advertising on the Super Bowl but we're going to be doing it before, you know, you know, featuring from premature babies and the other advertisers got it absolutely nailed on this year actually is Pepsi now Pepsi a big advertiser as we know in the Super Bowl and they, their, their halftime show has scored incredibly well on our system. In fact, if their halftime show kind of high pod was last year, they would have come second in our testing. So they bucked the trend in terms of teasers and done a really good job of getting us all wound up and excited about what's going to come. Yeah, the hype surrounding Pepsi's halftime performance really, really big every sort of year and this one I feel like is even bigger just because you have all of these West coast rappers that are so synonymous with Los Angeles where the Super Bowl is being played. How do you feel like this year's halftime performances fairing so far? Just based off of testing here. Amazing actually. I mean, I think it's, I mean, I was at the Super Bowl in 2011 and genuine, I couldn't believe how amazing the halftime show, it was almost, that was the highlight really for me. And I think Pepsi have taken all the good that, you know, that the, you know, the rappers, they've got their very broad, appealing, very familiar and that's really important with soup, all you want the music to be mass appeal. You don't want to be tunisian, they've nailed it with their lineup. I mean that as well. The ad was so well produced. I mean it was real Hollywood blockbuster levels. So I'm feeling great. I think we're gonna have an absolute classic on our hands. I, I'm in 100% agreement with you and I can't wait to talk about all of them the day after John Evans, chief bargaining officer of system one. Thanks so much John for joining us.