Super Bowl advertisers will not stop teasing us. Here’s why

If you haven’t dropped a teaser video yet, are you even advertising in the Super Bowl?

Brands that release videos hyping up their ads ahead of the game are taking part in a trend that’s been in the making for about a decade, according to Rick Suter, a senior content strategist at Gannett and editor of USA Today’s Ad Meter, which has tracked Super Bowl ads since 1989. Around 2014, teasers were relatively informal, perhaps in the form of social media polls or posts about ads to come, he said, but by 2020, Planters took the concept to new heights with the death and reincarnation of Mr. Peanut.

Now, there’s no denying it: “This is a thing,” Suter said.

Why tease a big ad buy, sometimes weeks in advance of game day? Some brands do it to generate buzz, while others deploy teaser videos exclusively for social media, execs told us. Whatever the reason, marketers said they still see the merit in dropping teasers—even though there are potential pitfalls.

Heads up

Even without teasers, there’s plenty of anticipation around Super Bowl ads: Research conducted by Marketing Brew and Harris Poll last year found that 76% of people who said they’d likely watch the game were “at least somewhat excited about the ads.”

Chris Symmes, senior marketing director for Unilever’s North American dressings portfolio, said Hellmann’s dropped a teaser for its ad this year to capitalize on existing audience interest in Super Bowl ads. Plus, there was plenty of material: When the brand was filming the ad, which features comedians Kate McKinnon and Pete Davidson, “all of us were just laughing hysterically, and we were all saying, ‘We have to use this as the teaser,’” he told us.

Todd Allen, SVP of marketing for Bud Light, said the brand did it in order to “give all of our fans a little taste of what to expect” ahead of the game.

In some cases, teasers can lead to earned media coverage in addition to generating hype, Jason Harris, co-founder and CEO of creative agency Mekanism, which has worked on about a dozen Super Bowl ads, said.

“You can do it without paying for placement, and people will still search it out, or it’ll be in a million articles,” he said. “It has a longer shelf life than that one day.”

In the rare situation where a brand’s teaser doesn’t elicit coverage, there’s always social conversation. Michelob Ultra released several teasers this year, and VP of Marketing Ricardo Marques said those videos started generating both “social conversation and coverage” almost immediately.

Social media mania

Way back when, Super Bowl Sunday served as “the big reveal” for most ads, Suter said. Since people don’t just consume media via their TV screens anymore, brands want in on the social conversation leading up to the big day. That was the goal for Kia America, according to VP of Marketing Russell Wager, who said teasers can spark chatter about a brand a few weeks before the game, thus potentially making a Super Bowl ad more effective. Oreo, which is returning to the Super Bowl after 11 years, had similar hopes, Michelle Deignan, VP of Oreo US, said.

“For us, it was really about taking advantage of all of the cultural conversations in the run-up to the Super Bowl,” she told us. “It’s really about maximizing the impact for brands, because the big game is huge, and we’re thrilled to be a part of it, but there’s so much more to it now, and the run-up is a really important part.”

Brands might not even have to pay to run teasers, Harris pointed out—they can just post them on their own accounts. E.l.f. Cosmetics, which is running its first national ad in this year’s Super Bowl, has more than 8 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, where it posted a handful of teasers for its ad featuring Judge Judy Sheindlin and members of the cast of Suits. That content is designed to “narratively tee up” the plot of the game-day ad, Brian Vaughan, partner and ECD of e.l.f.’s longtime creative agency Shadow, said.

High hopes

Teasers aren’t always beneficial, though. Some ad execs pointed out that there’s a risk of outshining or overhyping the ad itself.

This year, Nerds invited some social speculation about who’s starring in its first Super Bowl ad alongside Addison Rae after it dropped a teaser asking fans to guess who the creator was helping learn to dance. It remains to be seen if her co-star—an animated Nerds Gummy Cluster—will live up to the hype.

Teasing is “smart, from a marketing perspective,” Suter said, but risks undermining the creative concept of the ad.

“I have definitely seen campaigns where the teaser was incredible, and the commercial just was not,” he said. “It maybe wasn’t even necessarily because the commercial was not done well, it was because the teaser was so good.”

Additional reporting by Ryan Barwick.