For decades the Super Bowl has been the largest single night of advertising for brands across the United States. With over 100 million viewers annually, it is no surprise that the ads have become a mainstay of the event. A well-made Super Bowl ad can make a massive difference for a brand’s identity and bottom line (McAllister and Galindo-Ramirez, 2017). Surveys show that “the percentage of the audience that tunes into the Super Bowl solely for the commercials has risen from 2% in 1996 to 10% in 2005 to 22% in 2010” (Friedman, 2010). Running these ads is, however, quite the investment. At 7 million USD for a 30 second spot for the event’s broadcast in 2023, brands strive to make these commercials among their best (Monllos, 2023).
Super Bowl ads have become to many people an essential part of viewing the game. Beyond Super Bowl Sunday, consumers engage with these commercials by choice and on their own time. One study found that the ten most viral Super Bowl commercials of 2015 were shared 4.5 million times, and on Youtube fans spent more than 800 million minutes watching and rewatching the ads (McAllister and Galindo-Ramirez, 2017).
Now associated with the Big Game is the USA Today Ad Meter, which the newspaper began in 1989 to rank Super Bowl advertisements based on the entertainment value ratings. A 2015 study proved that high Ad Meter scores positively affected the value of the advertised company’s stock following the Super Bowl (Kim, Denton and Wang, 2015). The metric is respected by the public and advertisers alike, and its inception and continued prominence demonstrates the shift in attention away from the sporting event alone to the competition amongst advertisers and brands each year. Ad Meter rankings are often cited in other industry news outlets, and this growing coverage only fueled the heightened importance of Super Bowl commercials in the larger US advertising landscape (Elliott, 2012).
For many Americans, watching football is synonymous with drinking beer. And for many American beer drinkers, that beverage is Budweiser. Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Budweiser, has the highest share of beer sales in the nation due in part to their light beer offering Bud Light. AB InBev, which now owns Anheuser-Busch, controls nearly a third of all beer sales worldwide (Conway, 2022). For as long as many Americans can remember, Budweiser has been a part of the action on Super Bowl Sunday (Diaz and Schultz, 2021).
To best understand some of the brand’s biggest marketing pushes, one must look to their Super Bowl spots which have consistently ranked among the top Super Bowl commercials of the last 25 years (Suter, 2020). In a 2016 online survey, nearly 50% of respondents expected the beer giant to roll out the best commercials of the night (Slaughter, 2005). Budweiser has made a name for itself in producing funny, heart warming, and memorable commercials. In recent years, the brand has also put forth ads addressing worldwide environmental and social issues. Here, we aim to analyse these shifts as they exist in the larger framework of trends in advertising history.
An early Super Bowl Ad
In 1989, the same year that the USA Today Ad Meter came into existence, Anheuser-Busch debuted the “Bud Bowl” which pitted classic Budweiser against relative-newbie Bud Light in a series of stop-motion :30s that would show throughout the game. Additionally, the brand had miniature football fields and Budweiser vs. Bud Light score cards that viewers could pick up at in-store displays across the country. It was, according to AdAge, one of the first integrated promotions, and it even earned media attention on The Late Show with David Letterman (Ad Age Super Bowl Archive, 1989). According to an interview with Grant Pace, one of the copywriters on the Bud Bowl team at D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles agency in St. Louis, “people were talking during the game, but not during the commercial” so that they wouldn’t miss what happened next in the series (Chandler, 2009).
AdAge included the Bud Bowl among the best of Budweiser’s 37-year streak of advertisements which ran annually through 2021 (Diaz and Schultz, 2021). The Bud Bowl was a beginning for Budweiser as a staple of the Super Bowl and as an innovative brand that utilised modern animation technology, multiple spots in a serial format over the course of the game, and integrated marketing to successfully produce the Bud Bowl campaign.
A Recent Super Bowl Ad
Budweiser’s 2019 “Wind Never Felt Better’ Super Bowl spot highlights Anheuser-Busch’s commitment to renewable energy in the brewing process. While the brand doesn’t specify exactly how much of their electricity is generated through wind turbines, this commercial served to bring awareness to their eco-friendly practices. According to the International Journal of Engineering Business Management, consumers pay more attention to, and are more willing to purchase, green products “as a result of the oil crisis and rising environmental concerns” (Reddy et al., 2023). Positioning the brand as one that cares for the planet’s future at the widely-viewed Super Bowl is indicative of the changing attitudes of consumers and the trending tenets of environmental and social responsibility that many brands have embraced.
This was not the first advertisement that expressly touted the brand’s philanthropic ethos. In 2018 Budweiser’s “Stand By You” commercial promoted the company’s emergency relief canned water donation initiative, which was especially poignant due to natural disasters that had occurred months before in North and Central America (AdAge Super Bowl Archive, 2018). Budweiser seems to prioritise its image of generosity as the years go on, likely due to its importance in the eye of modern consumers (Schaeffer, 2019).
As society’s expectations of a company’s environmental and social responsibility changed, so too did the Budweiser Super Bowl Commercial. These expressions of a brand on the night of the big game are vital to the health and image of the business, as the Super Bowl Ad remains a quintessential part of the advertiser and consumer’s year.
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Rory Coleman 