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 The food delivery app and other
brands doing well during the pandemic including
electronics brand Logitech and gardening company
Scotts Miracle-Gro, will replace long-time
advertisers during Sunday's Super Bowl LV
telecast.
The celebrity-laden ads aim to inject some humor
and levity into the year's most-watched U.S.
televised event after 11 months of social
distancing and lockdowns.
Longtime advertisers Anheuser-Busch InBev’s
Budweiser and Coca-Cola are sitting out the
match-up between Kansas City and Tampa Bay to
fund COVID-19 vaccine efforts or save money.
Their absence makes room for a new roster of
advertisers that have boomed as the world faces
a third wave of the health crisis, marketing
experts said.
“I’ve never seen this many first-timers as a
percentage of the advertisers,” said Charles
Taylor, a Villanova University professor of
marketing.
Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B will join Wayne
and Garth to sing a jingle and tell viewers to
eat locally, kicking off a $20 million Uber Eats
campaign to support independent restaurants.
Logitech, maker of computer keyboards and
webcams which consumers rushed to buy as they
worked from home, recruited rapper Lil Nas X to
appear in a spot reflecting how artists have
used technology “to create the future,” set to
his newest song.
Some upstart brands found ways to poke fun at
rivals while touting their business model as
safer during the pandemic.
In a commercial for Vroom, a man sits strapped
to an interrogation chair as he attempts to buy
a car from a traditional dealership. The online
used-car marketplace will tout its home delivery
service and contact-less buying process.
Despite the pause by perennial advertisers,
ViacomCBS’s CBS broadcast network last week said
it had sold out commercial time for the game. A
30-second ad sold for about $5.5 million this
year, about the same as last year, said a person
familiar with the matter.
“With bigger names pulling out, it gives us a
chance to break through even more than we
expected,” said Peter Scherr, chief marketing
officer at Vroom.
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 A FINE LINE
While Super Bowl advertisers usually go for
laughs or tug at viewers’ heartstrings, brands
are skating a fine line to avoid insensitive
humor - no gerbil shot from a cannon this year -
or further depress sports fans after an
emotionally draining 2020, ad experts said.
Humorous ads are more likely to be uplifting,
rather than “knee-slapping sophomore humor,”
said Leeann Leahy, chief executive of VIA
Agency, which has worked on past Super Bowl
spots for Johnson & Johnson and Lowe’s.
Uber Eats competitor DoorDash will air its first
game day commercial featuring actor and rapper
Daveed Diggs alongside Big Bird and other Sesame
Street stars, drawing inspiration from the
children's show's focus on the impact of
neighbors and local businesses on people’s lives
the last year, said Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, vice
president of marketing at DoorDash.
And although Budweiser will sit out the game for
the first time in over 35 years, the brand's
owner, brewing conglomerate Anheuser-Busch, will
air an ad for the first time at the Super Bowl
reflecting its optimism for the end of the
pandemic as vaccines roll out.
The commercial, part of the company's two-year
$1 billion economic recovery campaign, features
a montage of people in normal times, including a
woman who offers to buy a beer for her laid-off
coworker and old friends catching up over a
drink.
“Everyone is saying, ‘I can’t wait to get
together again,’” said Marcel Marcondes, U.S.
chief marketing officer at Anheuser-Busch. “It’s
always more than just grabbing a beer.”
(Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas and Uday
Sampath Kumar in Bengaluru; Editing by Kenneth
Li and Howard Goller)
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