MUMBRELLA: ‘So many celebs, so much money, so many fails’: Adland weighs in on Super Bowl LVIII ads
Originally published on Mumbrella - 13th February, 2024
By Lauren McNamara
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Justin Hind and Ollie Beeston, co-CEO & founder and creative partner, Reunion
Hind: My favourite – I absolutely love the BMW ‘Talkin like Walken’ spot with Christopher Walken to launch the all-new BMW i5.
He’s such an amazing and unique talent (I’ve been fascinated with him since the 1985 Bond film ‘View to a Kill’ and I’m also a little biased, in a previous life we’d used him to launch the Qantas health insurance brand, Qantas Assure).
Superbowl 2024 > BMW Ad
I love the 15” teaser ‘What’s a teaser? Oh, it’s an ad for an ad, why would they do that?’.
BMW have used him and his persona in such an authentic way and they’ve leveraged the cultural meme of people impersonating him perfectly. The 60” also features Usher who’s headlining the halftime show ‘don’t you got somewhere to be?’ and it drives home their point of difference and leadership position beautifully, ‘there’s only one Christopher Walken and there’s only one ultimate driving machine’. It’s brilliant at every level. It’s my favourite by far.
My second favourite is DoorDash.
Superbowl 2024 > DoorDash
A big, big integrated activation leveraging the entire event and every other brands ad spend and products where ‘DoorDash will door-dash all the stuff from all the ads’ to one lucky winner. Every product – ‘all the snacks, every automobile, a tax service and who knows what else’. All to one person. It’s a massive, yet simple idea and I bet it’ll drive huge sign ups and activations. I also love all the Uber spots and the teasers, especially with the Beckhams but DoorDash wins the Super Bowl in their category in my opinion.
Beeston: My pick for the Super Bowl is Reese’s ‘Yes’ by Erich & Kallma. It’s also fantastic. A real rollercoaster of humour and a brilliant way to launch a major new product SKU. Humour is making a major comeback in advertising across the board, and with the new humour category at Cannes this year it will be interesting to see how this performs.
Superbowl 2024 > Reese’s Yes
Our agreed least favourite is Copilot for Microsoft.
Superbowl 2024 > Microsoft Copilot
It’s not that it’s terrible but more of a missed opportunity. Microsoft has been absent from the Super Bowl for four years, so for one of the biggest companies in the world, their return to the Super Bowl should be really big. Secondly it should have been more impactful and creative to introduce Copilot, their new AI platform.
The spot misses the opportunity to be contextually relevant within the Superbowl, and that’s where lots of the creative opportunity and potential to be different and noticed lies. Lastly the spot feels too passive for something so big as AI and what looks like the Copilot points of difference versus ChatGPT. It’s fine, but not great and for such a massive company, massive media investment and more importantly a game changer product in an explosive category. I think they’ve missed the mark when you look at the other commercials in the 2024 Super Bowl environment.
