WILMINGTON — When football fans in the greater Philadelphia region woke up Monday morning, it’s likely they found themselves reliving the surprisingly easy victory by the Philadelphia Eagles over the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl 2025, not the celebrity-packed advertisements.
While the Eagles win may give fans plenty to remember as they ferociously denied the Chief’s attempt at a “three-peat,” the continued tradition of a flurry of movie and TV stars in 30-second commercials made it impossible to pick clear favorites of the year.
For Colleen Masters, the executive creative director at Wilmington-based Aloysius Butler & Clark (AB&C), the stakes for advertising are simple: how memorable is the advertisement and will people think favorably about those 30 seconds?
When it’s about $8 million per advertisement just for the airtime alone, not including the cost for celebrities to appear or special effects, companies want to make sure the 113 million people watching remember the product, she said.
“It’s interesting, when you think of all the celebrities, you’d think there’s one that would stand out. But there were so many, it almost gave you whiplash,” Masters said. “I nicknamed it the Superstar Bowl because there were so many celebrities, it made the ones that didn’t have them stand out even more. The brands that relied on an idea rather than a famous face stood out a little more.”
Those “idea-driven” advertisements that succeeded in those simple goals was the Pfizer ad which featured a little boy who beat cancer. In the ad, he jogged through the streets with boxing gloves on, only to run into his mother’s arms by the end. The spot was to mark that the pharmaceutical company is fighting for eight cancer breakthroughs by 2030.
“That really did stop you in your tracks and it wasn’t relying on star power to do it,” Masters said.
There were rare celebrity advertisements that did well in muted moments, like Harrison Ford subtly making a pun on his own name while riding off in a Jeep or Aubrey Plaza’s spot for saltiness in Ritz crackers. But others that were weighed down by celebrities include the two Matthew McConaughey spots for Salesforce and Uber Eats and Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt and Kris Jenner sporting Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
Masters pointed to the Uber Eats ad with Kevin Bacon, Greta Gerwig, Martha Stewart, Charli XCX and Sean Evans as a prime example of an advertisement that would have been a commercial that everyone was talking about the next day. Now, it’s just table stakes for the Super Bowl expectations.
“With the sheer number of celebrities, you could have won the note. But it was funny, it was nice. But it wasn’t a standout,” she said. “And you have to think, is that a great investment for the $8 million they spend on this?”
Some star powered ads that were absurd, but did well in memorability, included Glen Powell’s charismatic action-packed reimagining of “The Three Little Bears” for Dodge Ram and Seal’s rendition of “Kissed by a Rose” as a seal. But other ads that featured no celebrities did just as well, such as Coffee Mate’s dancing tongue – which did feature Shania Twain’s voice – and Dorito’s fan-created alien abduction commercial.
One favorite of Masters in this vein was the advertisement for Coors Light, where people turned into sloths on the Monday after the big game to symbolize a slow-moving day that can be perked up with a beer. Masters said that Coors Light also noted a misspelling in one of Coors Light’s digital billboard advertisements in New York’s Times Square. Once the correction was made, Coors issued a statement that blamed the error on “a Case of the Mondays.”
“That was a great way to tease the Super Bowl advertisement, and their advertisement did a great job of landing the campaign,” she said.
There were some “idea-driven” advertisements that also fell flat, but probably none as big as ChatGPT which was its first since OpenAI went into business in 2015. The reported $14 million ad featured black and white animation pixels that showed greatest moments in innovations, comparing space travel and the discovery of fire to artificial intelligence
“I even struggled to explain what it was about. The point was that everything has a starting point, including AI. It had a product to show, and it didn’t capture your imagination,” Masters said. “People didn’t love it, but people didn’t hate it. So, it didn’t get talked about and it’s forgotten what was there – and in my mind, that’s a waste of money.”
