Tuesday night at the sticky-floored place in Southeast, somewhere between a heroic Total Eclipse of the Heart and my own indefensible Nine to Five, the table next to mine started playing Super Bowl teasers off a phone with the volume all the way up. We got through four of them before my song came around. I could not have told you which brand any of the four belonged to.
That is not a failure of attention. I was paying very close attention. I was, frankly, the most attentive person in that bar.
Three days out from LVIII and most of the spots are already online, which is now standard practice, and this year's crop has collapsed into a single format. Famous person appears. Second famous person appears, to the first one's visible surprise. A third arrives for the button. Cut to logo. Dunkin has Ben Affleck back for another round, which at least has continuity going for it, and everyone else has simply assembled a cast.
Seven million dollars for thirty seconds, and the idea is that you recognize the faces.
A celebrity cameo is not a creative idea, it is an insurance policy against not having one, and this year almost everybody bought the policy.
What separated the winners from the noise was never star wattage. It was whether the brand owned anything at all once the spot ended.
One. Pre-releasing kills the only structural advantage the game ever had. The whole point was a hundred million people seeing a thing at the same instant and turning to each other about it. Post it on Tuesday and by Sunday you are the rerun.
Two. A rented face is rented distinctiveness. The audience remembers the actor and forgets the advertiser. Ask anyone to name the insurance brand from a cameo-stuffed spot two years ago.
Three. The work that compounds builds an asset the brand keeps. Snickers has used famous people for years and it still lands, because the celebrity serves an idea about hunger that belongs to Snickers and to nobody else. Old Spice built a character. Duolingo spent five seconds and one green owl last year and got talked about more than spots costing twenty times as much.
A rented face is rented distinctiveness.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, so I know how it happens. Casting is the one part of the process a nervous client can evaluate with total confidence. Nobody gets fired for a name everybody already knows. The braver version requires somebody senior to say yes in October and still mean it in February, and that is rarer than budget.
The karaoke host calls everyone baby and lets us all sing badly and books precisely zero celebrities. The room is full anyway, every other Tuesday, because there is a reason to be in it.