Great Super Bowl Ads Are Designed For How Our Brains Are Wired

What makes a great Super Bowl ad? A glamorous roster of celebrities? A Billboard Top 100 soundtrack? While these things definitely help, they’re not as essential as the three fundamental elements of great brand marketing: fame, feeling, and fluency.

But first, let’s talk about our brains.

“System 1” and “System 2” are concepts developed by psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman to describe two different modes of thinking:

 System 1: This is our intuitive, automatic, and unconscious thinking. It’s very fast, very easy, and requires very little cognitive energy. Our brains are lazy, they love it when we think with System 1. 

System 2: This is our deliberate, conscious, and analytical thinking. It is slow, effortful, and requires a significant amount of cognitive energy.

Essentially, System 1 is what you’d use to drive home from work without a GPS and System 2 is what you’d use if someone asked you to build a GPS. In writing this article, my brain is using a lot of System 2 and I can vouch for its unhappiness.

Humans like feeling rational. Our egos hate the idea of being "emotional" decision makers. We like to believe our decisions are thought out and controlled by reason. But they mostly aren't. 95% of our brain time is spent in System 1.

So if marketers want to engage the human brain, they better engage System 1.

And the simple elements of fame, feeling, and fluency can help get you there.

A brand should seek fame for lots of reasons, just make it count. 

Fame is almost another word for brand awareness, but it’s subtly different. It shares commonly measured characteristics like unaided awareness or recognition among consumers. But fame has a more dynamic quality to it.

Brands that are famous are not just easily and widely known, they come to mind quickly and easily as the brand for particular buying situations. Fame gives brands a cultural currency that they can exchange for greater credibility, which can dramatically improve value and loyalty, allowing them to, among other things, command a premium price. 

Brands gain fame by being distinct and bold. It’s no coincidence that those things are linked to the lazy desires of our brains to quickly and easily find things that are different and stand out, which always makes them easy to remember. Think about that lime green shampoo bottle on a store shelf full of white and blue competitors. Or the tallboy can of water among a sea of clear plastic bottles.

Tubi probably did fame the best last night. No celebrities, no famous music. Just giant rabbits. It stood out. It demanded our attention because it was distinct and bold.

Brands that engage our feelings and emotions often do so for simple, yet effective affinity. 

We like brands that make us laugh, feel hopeful and optimistic, or smile with joy. That’s always good, but similar to the tactics around fame, our System 1 brains latch onto emotions when we’re forming memories. We can recall emotions easier than facts, so we recall brands that make us feel things better than ones that spit facts and features.

Ads with feeling are also distinct. When there isn’t much differentiation between the brands in your category (think beer ads, soft drinks, cars) storytelling and emotion are the only things your brand can truly “own” and use for distinction – stuff that’s important to System 1.

Lots of brands chose “nostalgia” as their emotion last night with several throwback references to the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Consumers who feel understood and valued are certainly great for a brand and the System 1 nostalgia strategy was certainly a strong way to get there.

Intuit TurboTax and The Farmer's Dog did a nice job making people feel last night. TurboTax was simple, freeing, and joyful. The familiar and popular music track also made an emotional connection that made it easy to love and easy to remember. The Farmer’s Dog used tear jerking storytelling about an aging dog and the love we have for our pets to make us lean in. 

Lastly, but certainly not least, are brands with fluency—they’re easy to recognize, find, and buy. 

When’s the last time you read the label on your favorite bottle of soda in order to find it in the store? Do you need to do a lot of analytical thinking when you shop for cereal or do you just look for the cartoon tiger? Fluency is an easy principle to understand when you think of CPG brands or stuff we physically buy in stores, but it applies to any brand selling anything. Auto insurance brands are remarkably good at this and repeatedly use a khaki-pants-wearing spokesman, a mayhem-causing spokesman, emus, spokesgeckos, and jingles that are literally just their brand name over and over. They use these devices in TV advertising, email campaigns, point-of-sale, and everywhere else their marketing goes. That kind of consistency is textbook brand fluency.

In addition to fluency aiding with brand awareness and credibility, a brand that’s consistent and easy to find and remember is a brand whose marketing dollars go further. If your brand is always being attributed to your marketing and it’s delivering again at the point of purchase, you’re running a very efficient marketing machine.

Dunkin'​ and Molson Coors Beverage Company probably did the best just with fluency last night. Dunkin' had opening shots of their store, a big time celebrity in head-to-toe Dunkin' swag passing their branded products out of the drive-thru window for 30 straight seconds. Molson Coors did fluency for three brands in one ad. Branded neon beer signs throughout, bottle shots, actors saying the brands over and over again, and a surprise ending with a giant on-screen logo.

The best thing about engaging System 1 and the principles of fame, feeling, and fluency is that they don’t just apply to million dollar budgets and major sporting events. You can apply these strategies to marketing at any level: TV advertising, social media posts, email campaigns, in-store signage – literally anything.

If you’re a smaller brand trying to apply these principles, think about how you can be different in your category and with the platform you’re using.

• What’s the most distinct thing to focus on for your next email campaign?
• How could your subject lines or post copy help you REALLY stand out?
• How might you use emotional storytelling to engage a prospect or customer?
• Is your brand as clear and consistent as possible across all your channels?

But wait! What about the remaining 5% of the time our brains are in System 2?

That time is still valuable and shouldn’t be discounted. It’s the perfect opportunity to deliver a great customer experience and give the more functional parts of our brains what they crave: data, facts, figures, and claims. If someone is comparing cars, after they’ve done all their System 1 thinking to narrow their choice down to two brands, they might look at MPG or horsepower differences between the two vehicles – make that incredibly easy for them.