More About Advertising: Dark Horses’ Matt Adams and Will Butler: Super Bowl 2024 ads that make us jealous
Dark Horses’ Matt Adams and Will Butler: Super Bowl 2024 ads that make us jealous
Writing a Super Bowl ad is like the Holy Grail for most creatives; it’s up there with Christmas ads in the UK, but maybe even better.
With Christmas ads there’s a bit of a set tone, but with Super Bowl ads the shackles are off – you can go funny, weird, emotive, or just pure ‘Murica.
And it’s not just that; the budgets are astronomical so seemingly nothing is off the table.
So, as a creative team who haven’t yet (hopefully) had the pleasure of writing our own Super Bowl ad, here are the six ads from this year that we’re most jealous of.
Paramount+
What a brief: ‘write an ad that features some of our most iconic characters’. The end result is brilliant, even better than last year’s. Patrick Stuart is funny in a way that only he can be, it’s full of great little gags and nods to some of the shows, and whoever wrote the line “we throw the child” deserves an immediate pay rise.
Kawasaki
We were skeptical about this one to begin with. At first, you think it’s just going to be vanity shots of their new ATV – and it is that, but it’s also so much more.
There’s a mulleted eagle, an excellent cameo from ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, and a great line to tie it all together. It makes us want to race around the forest in an ATV, although I don’t think we’ll be growing mullets anytime soon.
Uber Eats
This year’s Uber Eats ad has a really fun premise: that in order to remember everything that they deliver, you’ll have to make room in your brain by forgetting something else.
This leads to a bunch of ridiculous scenarios and is topped off with a host of funny celebrity cameos including The Beckhams, Jennifer Anniston, David Schwimmer, and probably a few more we’ve forgotten…
Doritos
When Jenna Ortega gets upstaged by two no-nonsense, ass-kicking Mexican grandmas, it tells you just about all you need to know.
It’s got mobility scooter car chases and an epic zipline finale that wouldn’t look out of place in a Tom Cruise film – aside from the aforementioned grandmas. It’s action-packed and hilarious in equal measure, and we bloody loved it.
Etsy
As two terrible gift givers, this ad really hit home for us. In their first-ever Super Bowl ad, Etsy use one of the most famous presents in history to show how hard it can be to reciprocate a great gift.
They show off their new Gift Mode feature brilliantly whilst being fun and a little bit silly at the same time. It also made us really want some cheese, which is never a bad thing.
CeraVe
Possibly our favourite of the bunch, if you like absolutely bonkers, totally absurd ads as much as we do, then this is the Super Bowl ad for you.
It’s rare to see a cosmetic brand that doesn’t take themselves or their ads too seriously, but this is an example of that and then some. They use their (sort of) namesake Michael Cera to show off their simple product benefit in a ridiculous yet effective way.
From moisturising the side of a mountain to meeting a very complimentary dolphin, you can tell that they had a lot of fun writing this ad and we salute them for it.
By Matt Adams and Will Butler, Creatives