I watched Super Bowl LV from the couch with a notebook and a bowl of chips, which is how I have watched every Super Bowl since people started paying me to have opinions about advertising. Truffles fell asleep on the notebook somewhere in the second quarter. By the end of the night I had written down four brands and crossed out two of them.
The loudest brand on the broadcast did not buy a single second of it.
Budweiser stepped out of the game for the first time in decades and moved the money into vaccine awareness. Coke sat out entirely. Pepsi kept the halftime show and skipped the in-game spots. Audi stayed home. Every one of those decisions got covered, argued about, and forwarded more than most of the ads that actually ran.
Absence only reads as a decision when a brand has been present long enough that people notice the room has gone quiet.
That is the part the hot takes skipped. Budweiser bought something real with its silence because thirty-odd years of Clydesdales made the silence legible. If your brand has never run a Super Bowl ad, not running one this year is not a statement. It is a Sunday. Sitting out is a move available to exactly the brands who could comfortably stay in, which is a small and irritating club.
What the vacancy did produce was two spots worth keeping. Reddit bought five seconds, the cheapest unit on the board, and filled it with a wall of copy nobody could finish reading in five seconds. People paused their televisions to read it. A brand with almost no budget turned the constraint into the idea. Oatly put its CEO in a field with a keyboard, singing badly about milk, and when half the internet said it was the worst thing they had ever seen, Oatly sold them a shirt that said so.
Neither of those was a big idea the way the category means it. Neither cost what the Clydesdales cost. Both of them knew exactly what they were, which is more than I can say for the parade of celebrity, product, tagline that filled the middle hour. I have sat in the rooms where those get sold. The celebrity is not the idea. The celebrity is what you buy when nobody in the room could agree on one.
The celebrity is not the idea. The celebrity is what you buy when nobody in the room could agree on one.
It rained here all Sunday, the flat gray kind that makes a living room feel like a bunker, and the best thing on my television cost five seconds. I keep thinking about the client who will ask me in March whether we should do something big. Sometimes the answer is smaller. Sometimes it is nothing at all, loudly.