Brian Kenny
Chief Marketing and Communications Officer
Harvard Business School
Much of the advertising purchased during the Super Bowl is about selling corporate brands, rather than products. Harvard Business School professor Shelle Santana discussed her case, “Super Bowl Storytelling” (co-author: Jill Avery), regarding the art of storytelling on the world’s biggest television stage.
Evanta Governing Body member Brian Kenny, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Harvard Business School, asked Shelle about brand storytelling during a live taping of the Cold Call podcast. Which stories win (or fumble) on game day?
BRIAN KENNY: Shelle Santana is an expert in consumer behavior, particularly in relation to spending and credit. Before embarking on her academic career, she was a marketing executive at American Express. Shelle, thanks for joining me today.
BRIAN KENNY: Shelle, I’ll start like I always do. Can you just tell me, what prompted you to write this case?
SHELLE SANTANA: I was teaching a course on branding this year, and we were going to do a module on brand storytelling. I thought the Super Bowl is such a unique opportunity to explore, examine, and observe the range of storytelling devices and features that brands use in this one moment and in this one platform.
BRIAN KENNY: The case gets into some data about how much brands are spending on advertising, generally speaking. What does that number look like?
SHELLE SANTANA: In general, brands tend to spend about $224 billion in advertising across all different platforms, and television is about 35% of that, so about $78 billion. The Super Bowl, in and of itself, is a $420 million expenditure on just that one day, and that’s just for the ad time. That’s not the ad production.
BRIAN KENNY: When did the ads start to become kind of their own phenomenon? At some point, we must’ve turned a corner where the ads became part of the story.
SHELLE SANTANA: A lot of people point to Apple’s 1984 ad, which aired, not surprisingly, on the 1984 Super Bowl when they announced the launch of the Macintosh personal computer.
BRIAN KENNY: Great ad.
It was the first time that this compelling story was told in anticipation of a product launch.
SHELLE SANTANA: That is still in the advertising Hall of Fame. A lot of people will point to it, the best ad ever. It was directed by Ridley Scott, who is a well-known film producer and director. It was really the first time that this compelling story was told in anticipation of a product launch, and that became sort of the benchmark for must-see TV and what brand storytelling could look like on this phenomenal platform when you’ve got one out of every three Americans in the country engaged.
BRIAN KENNY: So, does that mean the stakes are a lot higher for brands that are featuring an ad in the Super Bowl?
SHELLE SANTANA: I think what the cost of the Super Bowl does is it really forces brand managers to think about, what do I want to get out of this? And how do I measure the success of it? Do I want brand awareness? Do I want to drive sales? Do I want to drive conversation on social media? Those are all worthy goals, but they’re very different metrics.”
You need to be very clear on what you’re actually trying to accomplish.
BRIAN KENNY: What do you think about the strategy of kind of leaking them out?
SHELLE SANTANA: The clever thing about releasing the ads in advance is, you begin to engage consumers earlier, and then when you wrap that around a social media strategy, you can begin to drive conversation about your brand before, during, and after the airing of the Super Bowl. That’s another way that you can extend and expand your ROI on the investment. It’s not just about that 30 seconds that’s on network programming. It’s really about the conversation that you’re driving in advance of and after the Super Bowl.
It’s about the conversation that you’re driving in advance of and after the Super Bowl.
BRIAN KENNY: Can you effectively tell a story, a brand story, in 30 or 60 seconds?
SHELLE SANTANA: There are really four elements to a great story. You need to have a character. You need to have a plot. You’ve got to have some conflict or challenge that they overcome, and you have to have a moral of the story – what’s the message we’re trying to convey? That’s surprisingly easy to do in 30 or 60 seconds. Some people, obviously, are better at it than others, but with those four pillars, you can absolutely tell a great story in a short amount of time.
BRIAN KENNY: I do want to engage our audience in the conversation a little bit now. Is anybody out there interested in asking Shelle a question about Super Bowl storytelling?
CMO: Do you have any data to indicate that that brand storytelling actually converts into consumer behavior or consumption? There are these fantastic stories on the Super Bowl, but I think a lot of us look at that and say, “Hm, I wonder if that actually does drive sales.”
SHELLE SANTANA: This is a great question, and it’s one of the things that I talk about with my students. The first thing is, what do we really want to get out of this? Do we want to get brand awareness, brand engagement? The correlation between brand awareness, and brand engagement, and brand activity and sales, is there, but it’s a long tail effect, often. A lot of times, you have to just be patient.
What I ask my students is, “Let’s think about the opposite, which is, if we don’t do this at all, would we have the exact same sales?” I think there’s stronger evidence of when brands don’t invest in advertising and storytelling on a consistent basis, you see almost an immediate decline in sales. When they do invest, it tends to either remain stable or go up, but it may not do that in the immediate short-term, right? It’s a patient, long-term play.
HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.
Special thanks to Brian Kenny and Harvard Business School.
by CMOs, for CMOs
Join the conversation with peers in your local CMO community.