Did your brand just spend $8 million on a 30-second ad that alienated or ignored half its potential audience?
Agility requires a willingness to challenge long-held assumptions—like the idea that a celebrity and a massive budget are all you need for a winning Super Bowl ad. It demands that brands move from gut feelings to data-driven insights to understand what truly resonates with their audience.
Today, we’re going to talk about the biggest advertising event of the year: the Super Bowl. Millions of dollars are spent, careers are made, and brands have one 30-second shot to capture the zeitgeist. But beyond the spectacle and the morning-after buzz, what actually drives results? We’ll dig into the data behind the ads, exploring which brands successfully connected with key audiences, what the data says about using celebrities, and how the smartest brands think about the Super Bowl not as a single event, but as a strategic play in a much larger game.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Nataly Kelly, CMO at Zappi.
About Nataly Kelly
Nataly Kelly is Chief Marketing Officer at Zappi, based in Boston, MA. Previously she served at HubSpot as Vice President of Marketing, Vice President of International Operations and Strategy, and Vice President of Localization.
Nataly Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalykelly/
Resources
Zappi: https://www.zappi.io
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom: Did your brand just spend $8 million on a 30-second ad that alienated or ignored half its potential audience? Agility requires a willingness to challenge long-held assumptions, like the idea that a celebrity or a massive budget are all you need for a winning Super Bowl ad. It demands that brands move from gut feelings to data-driven insights to understand what truly resonates with their audience. Today, we’re going to talk about the biggest advertising event of the year, the Super Bowl. Millions of dollars are spent, careers are made, and brands have one 30-second shot to capture the zeitgeist. But beyond the spectacle and the morning after buzz, what actually drives results? We’re going to dig into the data behind the ads, exploring which brands successfully connected with key audiences, what the data says about using celebrities, and how the smartest brands think about the Super Bowl, not as a single event, but as a strategic play in a much larger game. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Nataly Kelly, CMO at Zappi. Nataly, welcome back to the show.
Nataly Kelly: Thank you so much, Greg. I’m thrilled to be here. Love the Super Bowl. Love talking Super Bowl ads.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And definitely always great to have you on the show. So, I, I, I think I lost track. I think this is time three or four. So, you know, returning champion yourself here, so looking forward to it. But for those that didn’t catch you on one of the previous episodes, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Zappy?
Nataly Kelly: Sure. So, I am the chief marketing officer at Zappy. We are a consumer insights platform and we are focused on helping brands understand how to win with consumers in their advertising, and also in their innovation, bringing new products to market, and tracking their brands. Uh, I have a background in international and growth marketing, especially digital marketing. I’m an author of multiple books. My latest book that just came out last June is called Brand Global, Adapt Local with Catherine Malkaure, former global CMO of Shiseido. And, you know, Zappy, a little bit about us, uh, we are consumer insights platform. We’re used by 350 global brands, including Pepsico, McDonald’s, Heineken, Reckitt, Diageo, mostly large consumer brands. A lot of our customers actually advertise in the Super Bowl and use our software to get insights from consumers to develop their advertising.
Greg Kihlstrom: Nice, nice. So yeah, you were definitely the person to talk with about, about this, and certainly a lot to to talk through. And we’ll put a link to the report, the Zappi report in the show notes so people can dive in deeper. Lots of stuff there. But before we get into specifics, maybe just a what’s a high-level take here? You know, was this a good or a bad year for Super Bowl commercials from a creative as well as a results perspective?
Nataly Kelly: Sure. So, this was a mixed year creatively. We saw that some brands took really smart risks and delivered a lot of humor, emotion, and really good storytelling that resonated with distinctiveness. But others, and in some cases, in some cases entire categories, really struggled to translate those bold creative ideas into execution and performance of the ads. I should just mention that at Zappi, we test with 20,000 consumers. So, these are category buyers, and we publish a next-day report the Monday after the Super Bowl on what actually worked and not just what people talked about on social media. And importantly, it’s not just whether they like the ad or not, it’s whether it actually moves them to buy, and whether there’s going to be ROI around that ad, which is very different from, did people like it? So, it’s a fast-moving moment. It’s high stakes advertising. What’s really interesting is what the data has to say.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I totally, I, I love that about the report because, you know, you can read the like everybody’s got an opinion, myself included, but to actually see because again, when it comes out the point of this is to drive sales and brand awareness and and all that stuff. And, you know, if it’s just I like the ad or not, it’s it’s interesting but not meaningful, right?
Nataly Kelly: That’s right. And every year we see that the ads that perform the best are the ones where the creativity is tied back to the brand and the actual product. I think a lot of marketers can get lost in forgetting that they have to have recognizable brand assets, a clear message, clarity of communication is really key. That’s what drives that strong sales impact and brand uplift. And a lot of advertisers spend all this money on these ads and don’t actually get that the fundamentals right.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, for such an investment. It’s tough when you when you when you miss that. So yeah, let’s let’s dive into, we’re going to we’re going to look at a few aspects of the ads in, in here and again, plenty, plenty more in the report. But I want to start here with potentially a blind spot here and, you know, connecting with at least some of the modern audience. Zappi’s data shows a persistent gap in how women are represented in Super Bowl ads, despite making up nearly half the audience and and driving most household purchasing. So from a strategic standpoint, why do you think so many brands continue to miss this massive opportunity?
Nataly Kelly: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, Greg, because the NFL has shared that their viewing audience is now roughly 49% female, so nearly half and half. But our analysis shows that even though women appear in two thirds of the ads, they are not the focal point of the creative in many, you know, just over a quarter of the Super Bowl ads had women being kind of, you know, front and center and and having an important role within the ad itself. So, the women are not centered in the story. That really limits how strongly the ads will resonate with a very large and influential segment of the audience because, keep in mind, even if you’re just focused on viewership, it’s about half and half men and women. But they’re the ones who drive 85% of the household purchasing decisions. So, if you’re advertising a household product or a salty snack or an alcohol brand, women are usually the ones putting those products in their shopping cart. So, it’s actually really important for advertisers to appeal to women. And what’s also very interesting about this point is that, you know, the ads that score the highest with women also tend to be the top performers overall. So, they tend to perform well with men as well, while the ads that are most popular with men are less predictive of total success. So, that’s really interesting that ads where women have a central role are commercially stronger. They actually drive better ROI. That’s what we see in terms of the sales impact scores.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean that’s what I noticed in in the report was there wasn’t a, okay, women like this ad or, you know, the, there was a, there was a lot of consistency in that way. And yeah, it’s it just seems definitely, definitely missed opportunities. And so to your point beyond even, you know, simple representation, what what patterns did you see in the ads that did resonate strongly with women this year? Are there, you know, specific creative elements, narrative approaches that that had better performance?
Nataly Kelly: Yes, and I think it’s interesting because I personally, until I saw the data and saw the research, kind of had an assumption in my head of like, oh, the things that are slapstick humor may appeal more to men. You know, that’s kind of that was my assumption, but actually that turned out to be wrong because when we looked at the data and we looked at the ads that performed well specifically with women, one of them was the Hellman’s Sweet Sandwich time, and that had quite a bit of slapstick humor. It was quite funny and I laughed, you know, really hard when I saw that ad. But the data shows that these really exemplify the strong advertising that resonates with women. It’s good storytelling, it’s, you know, future-looking narratives with a bit of humor tied in. The other one that I should call out is Fanatics Sports Book bet on Kendall. That was an ad that I don’t think a lot of people anticipated would be so good. But you know, it was with Kendall and, you know, I think it was one that also was called out by Marissa Solis, SVP of Marketing for the NFL, as a really great ad. And it was, it was fun. You know, it was very fun. Kendall was very much herself. It was a great use of a celebrity where we often see a lot of the celebrity ties fail. It did really promote the product. You know, the heart of marketing here, the product was front and center. You know, women tend to respond to storytelling, warmth, and future-oriented themes, but they also love seeing women play a central role and that’s what Kendall did in this ad. I think the ads that neglect the female focus creative tend to miss both the audience alignment and the commercial opportunity. And the commercial opportunity being the most important here because as a CMO, you know, you want to make sure that you have job security. And the way to do that is to drive business results. It’s not to make people laugh at your ad or to have a celebrity that people buzz about for a couple of days after the Super Bowl, it’s about delivering business results.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, there’s a lot of ways to spend $8 million to get to get some sales and and things like that.
Nataly Kelly: Yes.
Greg Kihlstrom: Let’s talk a little bit more about celebrities. So, you know, to your point, not not all of them worked well. So, there but they’re kind of a default tactic. Like you know when you’re going into the Super Bowl, you’re going to see a bunch of ads with celebrities in them. But the the your data suggests that it’s not a guaranteed win. So, when does a celebrity act as an amplifier for a brand’s message versus just kind of becoming a distraction and kind of an eye-roll moment?
Nataly Kelly: Right. You know, it’s all about the dosage, the concentration of how you use the celebrity, how much you use them, but also the tie-ins, you know, and how it’s what the execution is at the end of the day. You know, creating a great Super Bowl ad and a great TV ad in general, it’s a mix of metrics and it’s a mix of things that have to work together in harmony to to really deliver results. You know, celebrities are great for grabbing attention. And this is something important because in the Super Bowl, you know, people are hyped up on the game and there’s lots of ads and there’s lots going on when you think about in that moment culturally in households. People are talking, they’re, you know, critiquing the performance of the players, they’re, you know, discussing what’s going to happen next. And so to break through, a celebrity can be a good idea, but the data shows not a guaranteed performance lever on their own. So, our data showed that celebrities show up in 25% of the ads that we test annually for television ads. But for Super Bowl, that number goes up to 68%. So, brands are trying to get attention however they can. Now, while they can drive relevance and distinctiveness, Greg, it can also be distracting and it can interrupt and impact brand recall. So, I’m sure this has happened to you. It happened to me last year, you know, there were certain celebrities that were in multiple ads. And I couldn’t remember which ad was which. So, as a brand, you have to be really careful in choosing which celebrities you use, but also how you use them. Because often the consumers don’t remember the brand, they remember the celebrity instead. And so you want them to remember your brand. It’s really important that they fit naturally with the brand and that it’s authentic to who they are, but they have to reinforce what the brand is trying to say. So, we there were a few good examples this year that I really loved. The Michelob Ultra, they had this wonderful ad, the Ultra instructor. And it was Kurt Russell as the trainer and we had, you know, Chloe Kim and Olympian and NHL champion, you know, TJ Oshie and viewers loved the tie-in to the Winter Olympics, which I think was really a smart move, knowing that it’s the Super Bowl, but the Olympics are going on. That’s reflecting the culture back to the viewer. But also they loved Kurt Russell as the trainer. He did such a great job. It was so on character for him. And then, you know, Wegovy had, you know, this, they had multiple celebrities. You know, they had DJ Khaled, they had Daniel Brooks, they have a bunch of celebrities in that ad. People liked that a lot, and it was a good way to use celebrities to build familiarity and credibility in a sensitive category, you know, of weight loss products. There were a couple of others that stood out to me. You know, Ritz, you know, they had the Ritz Island ad and Bud Light had the Keg ad. They had celebrities woven into the humor. But they still kept the brand front and center. So, they did a good job, I think, of leveraging celebrities and keeping the brand front and center. So, you know, the common thread is not fame. It’s that the celebrity serves the purpose of the brand and the story, not the other way around.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because other otherwise it’s kind of a maybe not financially cheap, but it’s kind of a cheap way to get some kind of notice or something, but but to your point and to the data’s point, not always effective, right?
Nataly Kelly: That’s right. And, you know, you mentioned the 8 million. It’s some of these ads were 8 to 10 million for the placement alone. That’s not counting the cost of actually hiring the celebrity and doing the, you know, the creative production. So, 8 million is like the starting point for what one of these ads costs. You know, it’s the it’s the bottom. It’s not the the ceiling by any stretch.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So, let’s talk a little bit about categories then as well. So, looking across CPG, tech, automotive, what are the common creative threads in some of the top performing ads and maybe are there distinct playbooks that may work for one category but not in another?
Nataly Kelly: Yes. I mean, across all categories, we find that the best Super Bowl ads do a few key things. One, they make sure that the product is featured prominently and in an interesting way, even if they use celebrities. Two, they make you feel something. This is so important. You know, the worst Super Bowl ad is one where you walk away with ambivalence and you don’t feel like you had any emotion at all. You know, I like to point out Himms and Hers as one that has done this two years in a row where they played into this emotion of outrage. And it really works and it’s very effective, but it’s an unusual strategy because a lot of the emotions that advertisers tend to leverage are, you know, laughter and, you know, happiness and joy and sometimes sadness, but they, you know, resolve it emotionally with the narrative by the end of the ad. You feel a little sadness, you have some emotional peaks and highs and lows, you know, all of those things. Another really common one is to feel something with humor. You know, that’s that’s not the only way, but it’s a very common way to use storytelling and and to get at the the viewer’s emotions. But you also have to make sure that you’re distinctive. And so it’s very good to bring in a surprise factor. You know, with the Budweiser ad, American Icons, we saw, you know, that moment where the it looks like a Pegasus, but it’s the eagle and the pony and the baby eagle have grown up. And it’s like this glorious cinematic moment that really is distinctive and it brings that surprise factor to the viewer. So, that was really again. Budweiser does such a great job and and they’re leaders in their category within these ads.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So, let’s talk a little bit more about measurement then as well. So, as we were saying earlier, you know, the day after the game, there’s a lot of talk, certainly lots of opinions and about, you know, what was the funniest, more or less memorable, all of that. I know you talked a little bit about this, but maybe maybe go into a little more detail. How, how does Zappi measure the difference between an ad that simply entertains and, you know, maybe memorable in some way, but one that actually drives that business impact you were talking about earlier?
Nataly Kelly: Yes. So, as you mentioned, Greg, you’ll have your favorite ads. I’ll have my favorite ads. Ask any consumer on the planet. We’re all going to have different stand out ads that, you know, we, we think and as arm chair quarterbacks on Sunday, we love to look at these and and say, oh, I love that one. I love that one. That’s why you see so much analysis out there that is very subjective because we’re all in a different segment, you know, of the market, uh, at large for the for consumer brands. So, a lot of what we measure at Zappi is looking at multiple dimensions and not just what got attention. So, we actually have a framework that looks at a bunch of different things. We call this our sales impact score and it’s a hybrid metric, a roll up metric of five different things. So, we look at purchase uplift. Is this ad likely to deliver ROI versus just a short-term sales spike? So, that’s really important because you could get a little spike, but that’s not going to help you grow your brand over time. So, we look at purchase uplift, but not just in the context of, you know, did they, are they more likely to purchase before and after? That’s an easy thing to measure. What’s harder is to think about all these other elements. So, we also looked at distinctiveness. Is the ad different from other ads viewers have seen? And we ask consumers about this. Brand recall, did the viewers spontaneously recall seeing an ad for the for the brand? Overall emotion, what if anything did the viewers feel after seeing the ad? And we also look at the top scoring emotion, what emotion specifically did the ad make viewers feel the most. And what we do is we compare the scores to what we call category norms. This is basically a benchmark for all the other ads in that category. What we do at Zappi is we pull a curated norm. This is uh, consumer insights and data science speak for essentially, it’s a combination benchmark of all the best performing television ads in the United States for the prior year and we rate the, you know, measure performance of the Super Bowl ads against that curated norm. So, we’re essentially rating and evaluating performance against the best of the best TV ads to see how they performed. What the data shows is that entertainment can help, but only when it translates into brand and business outcomes. And that’s how we separate the ads that people talk about the next day from the ads that actually help brands win with consumers and gain market share.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely a lot more rigor than than uh, than some person’s opinion. Right? And again, I I read those too for what it’s worth, but
Nataly Kelly: Yes, we all do.
Greg Kihlstrom: Definitely, uh, I mean back to your point and back to the the point about ROI, like that’s that’s what it’s really about is the the long-term long-term gains. What do you see, you know, based on the the analysis, what do you see as the biggest mistake that brands make that maybe causes that, you know, lots of investment to your point, not only the 8 million to place, but, you know, you get five celebrities in an ad, production costs, all all of the huge investment, what’s a mistake that or the the biggest mistake that brands make that make that investment fall flat?
Nataly Kelly: Yes. Well, it’s very important to us that they not make those mistakes because, you know, our system amplify that we use to test these ads was actually developed with major advertisers, including customers and most of them are major Super Bowl advertisers. So, they can’t afford to make mistakes. It’s such a huge investment. They have to make sure that they perform. So, uh, the biggest misstep is often not missing a creative trick, it’s usually failing to connect the idea to a brand and a business outcome. So, a lot of these ads focus on the momentary entertainment without ensuring that creativity really maps back to the brand promise, the the needs of the consumers in these categories and purchase intent. So, we’re an emotional hit or a funny moment doesn’t translate into long-term memorability or real impact is where advertisers make mistakes. And that is the single biggest thing that we see every year. We’re like, ah, such a shame. They failed to really capture that opportunity to put the brand in front of the consumer a little bit more. Sometimes it’s just if they would have shown it once or twice more throughout the ad, it would have massively improved their their sales impact. But sometimes they just miss that. Another real mistake is following a formula. If you try to do formulaic creative, your ad is probably just going to end up in the murky middle in terms of creative, which is not going to give you something distinctive. And it’s not going to drive emotional relevance and that’s really the worst place to be is where people are ambivalent or don’t talk about the ad at all because they don’t even remember it.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Nataly Kelly: Another thing that we see is if you try to be too clever and you try to double down on stunts, that can be a mistake as well. So, Coinbase’s ad where they basically had like a karaoke moment, it was widely seen as a miss, but we have seen executions of breaking the fourth wall to be effective. So, they had a QR code ad in 2023. It was exciting, but it wasn’t exciting the second time around. So, that’s related to that formulaic factor. Like if you’re trying to be formulaic, you know, something that was used before might not actually break through the next time you do it. So, what we advise brands to do is pressure test their creative early. We often see Super Bowl advertising, you know, starts to be developed in April. You know, so, you know, February is Super Bowl. Brands are building their Super Bowl ads for the next year starting in April. And we see the first actual tests run in Zappi in August. And they’re iterating and iterating and trying to make it better and better up until it’s time to deliver their final creative. And by the way, that’s really important because culture evolves. You know, I often think, what if I had chosen a celebrity and the day before the Super Bowl they have a scandal?
Greg Kihlstrom: Right.
Nataly Kelly: Sometimes advertisers have to pull their ad because of that. You know, we’ve seen, you know, major insurance companies had to pull their Super Bowl ads because of a natural disaster and, you know, they had a lot of claims and they had a lot of people suffering. So, they felt it’s not a good moment for us to come out with a funny ad at the Super Bowl when people are struggling and dealing with their insurance providers. So, these brands have a lot of tension in figuring out how do we hit the cultural moment just right to make this investment worth it, and build up and make sure that we have enough time to really make sure that the ad will perform. And that takes a lot of iteration and testing that creative early and often and asking yourself, does this idea really reinforce who we are? Is it going to, you know, land well in the cultural moment that the country is at? You know, when you’ve got that creativity, brand intent and the cultural alignment all together, the Super Bowl can be a really great growth opportunity for your brand.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, but yeah, to your point, trying to guess what February’s going to be like in April. I don’t know, that’s that’s some that’s some talent and some some really good data and and a bunch of other things, I would imagine. So, luck, maybe, too.
Greg Kihlstrom: Well, let’s let’s talk a little bit about how the ads performed. so, you know, maybe talk about some of the winners and losers in the advertising Super Bowl here. So, from, from the data, you know, who came out on top?
Nataly Kelly: Sure. So, I will, I will say, you know, we look at because we are serving the advertisers with our technology and our, you know, how we’re testing this. We look at by category, who the winners are because, you know, if you’re Dove, you’re not competing with Pringles. But Pringles is for sure, you know, competing with other salty snacks and snacks in general. So, in Pharma, the top performer for sales impact score was actually Wegovy. They had the highest performing ad sales impact score 97, which is really, really high. Most other categories didn’t have such high sales impact scores. In beverages, we found that Budweiser American Icons had the highest sales impact score of 88. And by the way, when we talk beverages, people think, well, is it an alcohol brand or is it a soft drink? They actually compete with each other in terms of the Super Bowl because you can have a glass of water, you can have a Budweiser can of beer, you can have a a can of Coke Zero or Pepsi Zero Sugar, you know, you can have any of those brands all beside each other. And it’s your choice as the consumer, what are you drinking on the night? In personal care, Dove did a great job. They had a sales impact score of 80. In food, we saw that Pringles with their Pringle Pringle-eo, 87, very clever ad. In automotive, Toyota had the best performing ad with Superhero Belt. It was a very, compelling, emotionally compelling ad. And in sports, the NFL, oh, they always do such a great job with their ads. There was You are Special, which they had actually aired long before the Super Bowl, but people loved it on the night as well and it had a great sales impact score of 84. So, lots of great performers. What really stood out to me this year, Greg, is in terms of sales impact, the GLP-1 advertisers, Wegovy, Himms and Hers and Roe, also had the top three sales impact scores. We’re seeing right now a high level of distrust in systems, which raises the bar for advertising in this category. And the pharma ads that perform best really had to strike a careful balance. So, last year, Himms and Hers really crushed it with their ad. They really drove a lot of sales. And this year we saw Wegovy and Roe come into the Super Bowl advertising fold and they did a great job all three of them this year. They were edgy, they grabbed attention, but they also struck the right chord, which is really hard to do in a category like this where you’re discussing something sensitive that’s health related. So, hats off to all three of them.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Nataly Kelly: You know, Himms and Hers took an approach where they led with a message of the widening wealth gap in America and they argued that this is a health gap. And they used Common, who, you know, is an amazing award-winning rapper and actor and his voice is just so iconic. And, you know, they had this hard-hitting intro saying rich people live longer with a montage of images that show how much preventive care and custom care the wealthy actually receive. And it was highlighting this contrast between what the wealthy receive and what the average person receives. And the tone then shifts to direct them to Himms and Hers as a provider and a solution to this problem and giving products to the everyday person. And last year they were talking about their GLP-1 products. This year, they actually showed more of a comprehensive product line. So, it was really interesting to me how they positioned this and use this moment to expand the footprint for their brand and make it clear to people that that’s not all they do, whereas some of the other brands were focusing more on the GLP-1 piece itself. So, you know, this was really, really interesting, uh, for me to see.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Nataly Kelly: When you look at the winners across industry, that’s one way of looking at the data and I mentioned some of the winners by category. But we also look across different demographics because every brand has a different goal. Like, are they trying to gain market share with younger or older audiences? Are they trying to, you know, gain share of wallet with women or men? And what we saw is Wegovy actually was the top performer among women and men. And Himms and Hers was second among women and men. And the top three performers in terms of sales impact for men were actually Wegovy, Himms and Hers and Roe. So, all three of the top performing ads for sales impact were weight loss products. So, super interesting. Among younger crowds, so under 35, uh, Himms and Hers was number one. So, this rich people live longer, strong sense of like driving that, you know, awareness of inequality. And then the second best performer in under 35 was Nerds. That Taste Buds ad was one of my favorites. I loved it. It was so fun and bright and, you know, brought just a bit of celebration, which I think is perfect for the Super Bowl moment. And then Wegovy was the third for under 35. And then over 35, interestingly, Wegovy was the top and then Himms and Hers, and then Lays, the Last Harvest, which was a beautiful ad. But it really appealed, I think, to men more than women. It ranked higher with men because it was showing this man who’s passing his heritage down to his daughter and his farm and it it appealed to men. It was an emotional ad and it really showed like the relationship between a father and a daughter. And, you know, moving into retirement. I think something that really just resonated very well with men.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so what what about, were there any surprise like surprise misses or or anything like that?
Nataly Kelly: Yes. So, a lot, there’s a lot of buzz about how many AI advertisers there were. There was not a single AI focused ad that landed in the top 10 by sales impact score. Some of these ads were trying to be clever or a little self-referential, like inside baseball type thing, like poking fun at AI tropes or no ads, you know, in in the case of the Anthropic ad with Claude. That assumes a level of consumer understanding that just isn’t there yet. When you look at how many consumers are using AI tools, it’s just not there. It’s like, you know, these ads were created for kind of a different audience than what watches the Super Bowl. So, the AI market is just not a mature category yet for that type of inside joke. So, these messages tend to resonate with people who already use AI, but the opportunity is really with the broader audience. So, in aggregate, when you look at the fact that there were so many, it’s kind of good for all of these brands that they’re raising awareness of AI as a category. And it will break through with the more tech savvy segments and maybe that was part of the strategy like we’re going to try to appeal to just that slice of the market. But they did underperform and they came in well below benchmark and keep in mind, we test with people who are likely to buy the product. So, even when we tested with the people who are likely to buy an AI tool, these ads did not drive the sales impact score that you would hope for such a large investment.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, definitely, there’s lots more to to dig into in the report, so we’ll we’ll make sure people have access to that. But, you know, as as we wrap up here, and to your point as brands are they’re probably some are already thinking about next year, some are going to be in the in the coming weeks, you know, as as they’re looking ahead. What’s a forward-looking trend from this year’s ads that will perhaps define the next wave of Super Bowl advertising in 2027?
Nataly Kelly: Well, what I’m looking forward to in 2027 are Super Bowl ads that really are rooted in a clear understanding of who the brand is trying to connect with and that don’t make some of those mistakes. Like, if you’re going to spend all this money on an ad, please make sure the product is visible, the brand is visible, the communication is clear, the message is clear. Those are kind of the three hallmarks of great advertising. You know, promoting that product, making people want to buy it, making it sexy, making it fun, making it, you know, prominent. All of those things are really, really important. But I also would love to see more advertisers prioritize their audience within the broader Super Bowl audience. So, that that will really make sure that those sales impact scores go up and that purchase likelihood increases.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, Nataly, thanks again. Always great to talk with you, and one last question for you. I I know I’ve asked this before, but I’ll ask it again. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Nataly Kelly: Well, I’m lucky because I work in a business where we have to stay close to the consumers as part of our job, and it’s impossible to stay on top of where the consumer is headed if you’re not agile enough. So, I think we’re hyper-agile at Zappi because we’re constantly evolving our platform and making sure that our customers know where the consumer is headed. So, and looking at the data of how they actually behave, not just how we think they will. That forces me to stay curious, adaptable. I also spend tons of time listening to the brands that we serve and trying to understand their challenges and what they’re up against so that we can help them with our technology. And so, you know, those challenges in the market are those early signals are what makes us adapt and stay agile and continue to evolve.
Greg Kihlstrom: Love it.
Nataly Kelly: Thank you so much, Greg, for having me.
