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How to Win the Big Game…with Your Commercial

February 4, 2025 How to Win the Big Game…with Your Commercial

Back in the analog age, Jimmy Siegel’s professional anxiety spiked on the morning after the Super Bowl.

“I was very nervous looking at the paper,” Siegel, who rose to the Vice Chairman post at advertising giant BBDO, recalled in an interview last week. “There was the USA Today ad meter. You wanted to be in the top 10. You didn’t want to be 38th. You cared about it because your clients cared about it.”

Nowadays, many Super Bowl commercials get released well before the actual big game, with sponsors aiming to activate their brands ahead of kickoff and stand out among the ever-increasing crowd. Whenever the spots hit the air, be it more than a week before the ceremonial coin flip or during the fourth quarter, they receive instantaneous feedback thanks to social media and digital journalism.

Yet if the timing has changed for delivery and feedback, the anxiety and mystery remains: On the largest and most intimidating advertising stage of the year, how do you prevail? How do you make anyone’s and everyone’s top 10?

Siegel, who now owns his own agency Siegel Strategies, offers simple advice based on his own success: “I think humor is the key. People watch the Super Bowl not to see something serious. I had certain clients who wanted to run more serious ads, and I would try to dissuade them from it. I told them, ‘People want to be entertained. People want to be laugh.’”

That wisdom – and wit – drove Siegel to considerable Super Bowl success. He wrote the following ads that connected with the public:

  1. A Visa Check Card spot  in 2001 that utilized the device of rapidly procreating rabbits to illustrate how slowly a competing (unnamed) credit card operated, compared to the Visa check card ad’s expediency. “That did the best ever” of his Super Bowl spots, Siegel recalled.
  2. Also for the Visa Check Card in 2003, a blend of NBA superstar Yao Ming, baseball icon Yogi Berra and the phrase “Yo!” A little-known fact: The company first wanted famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma to serve as the comic kicker, but when they couldn’t agree on a price, the pivot was made to Berra.
  3. The Visa Check Card campaign possessed some serious legs. Go back to 1997 for this spot in which war hero and Kansas Senator Bob Dole, having just lost the presidential election to Bill Clinton, poked a lot of fun at himself.
  4. Dole was not the first politician whom Siegel recruited to display some comic chops during the Super Bowl. In 1994, former vice president Dan Quayle played himself in this ad for Wavy Lay’s potato chips.
  5. Before the Visa Check Card entered the public consciousness, the Visa Gold Card earned prime time with this spot starring NBA superstars and Olympians Hakeem Olajuwon and Scottie Pippen.

Of course, it’s not all about making people laugh. If viewers don’t remember what the commercial pitched as it made them laugh, then all will be lost.

“You hope they like the ad enough, and then the product comes through,” Siegel said.

The Visa check card spots in particular worked so well because they repeatedly drove home the same effective and simple message: Use this card and your life will be easier. The humor derived from the difficulties encountered by those who didn’t use the card.

It’s a high-wire act to make the product come through while entertaining the masses _ many if not most of whom aren’t even prioritizing the commercials over the football. We’ll see on Sunday night which brands can pull it off.

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