What Was Your Favorite Super Bowl Ad
Super Bowl ads are the most expensive impressions in the world. Every brand that ran one this year spent more on 30 seconds than most businesses spend on marketing in a year. And the teams behind those ads tested every single frame before it aired. The same people who watched those ads, laughed at them, shared them with their friends, those are your customers. Same brains. Same psychology. Same reason they stop scrolling. Most people treat the Super Bowl like entertainment. The best marketers treat it like a free research library built by the highest paid creative teams on the planet.
Most people are launching ads blind.
Scrolling on Instagram hoping a great ad shows up in their feed, so it becomes the inspiration for their next best performer.
Or asking ChatGPT for ideas and wondering why their ads sound like a college textbook about marketing that nobody asked for. Maybe getting Claude Co-work to launch their ads while they go get a matcha tea latte.
I get it. That sounds kind of nice honestly.
Same Psychology, Different Zeros
Super Bowl ads cost millions per spot. Every second is tested. Every frame earned its place.
And it airs the one day of the year people actually want to watch commercials.
Think about that. The audience is leaning in. They want to be entertained. They're texting the best ones to their group chat before halftime is over.
Those same people are scrolling past your Facebook ad at 11pm on a Tuesday.
A $10M spot and your $10,000 Facebook ad budget run on the same psychology. Same hooks. Same reason people stop scrolling and stop chowing down to pay attention. The budget has different zeros on it, the mechanism is identical.
You can study how Pepsi opens with a pattern interrupt. How Pringles leads with humor (and hot girls). These are decisions made by the best marketing teams in the world playing with the most expensive impressions in the world.
Most people just watch the game and move on.
I once worked on a Super Bowl ad for Booking.com. And the thing that stuck with me from that experience is how much rigor goes into every single second. That level of intentionality is what separates the ads people share from the ads people skip.
Your customers, the same ones who watched those Super Bowl ads, are laughing and sharing them with their friends. They should be doing that with your ads too. That would be pretty cool. Your ROAS would look pretty cool as well.
The Best Teams Have Systems
Here's where most people get it wrong.
They think great ads come from inspiration. Some random moment in the shower where the perfect hook just hits you.
I used to believe this. I'd sit down to write an ad, stare at a blank screen, and wait for something to come to me. Sometimes it did. Most of the time it didn't.
The best creative teams I know always know what's working right now. In their niche. Across their competitors. Even cross market advertisers selling to the same type of customers.
And it's built into their workflows.
There are brands you care about that are signal, and there are brands you don't care about that are noise. The question is whether your research workflow filters for one or drowns you in the other.
A lot of teams treat competitive research like a Monday morning chore. Open up Meta Ad Library, scroll for 45 minutes, screenshot a few things, close the tab.
That's hours of your life every week. And most of what you find you'll never use.
The better approach is letting the ads come to you. Track competitors. Track fast growing brands. See what hooks keep showing up, what angles are getting tested over and over.
When research takes seconds, the creative process gets all the oxygen.
Your Next Hook Is Already Written for You
Comment sections are a goldmine everyone walks past.
Pull up any ad and every comment is right there. Real people telling you exactly what they care about, in their own words.
Someone says "I love my Eskiin, absolutely the BEST." Someone else asks about bath water filters. One is social proof you can build an entire ad around. The other is a product idea your competitor probably hasn't even noticed.
Both showed up for free.
It's like the marketing version of gold sitting on the ground and everyone is busy digging holes.
When your market describes your product in their words, that's better copy than anything you'll write at your desk. Pull those words out, turn them into creative, and it sounds like your customer wrote it.
Because they kind of did.
The Ratio Matters
When research takes seconds, the creative gets all the time. When research takes hours and everyone's doing their own version in their own browser tabs, the actual ad making gets squeezed into whatever time is left.
Fix the system and the creative gets better on its own. You're feeding it with signal instead of noise. Everything compounds from there.
