Once again, last night’s Super Bowl featured a game within the game, as CPG brands spent lavishly on TV ads to boost their sales and wrestle market share away from competitors. With costs of $8M or more per 30-second spot—not to mention the production costs and paying A-list celebrities—you can be sure that these brands attempted to squeeze value out of every second. Tellingly, some brands dedicated a majority of their screen time to packaging and key distinctive assets.
Across the CPG commercials that aired, packaging and distinctive brand assets accounted for 39% of total screen time for CPG ads—representing an estimated $3,156,700 of the total cost per ad dedicated to screen time for packaging.
At Designalytics, we remind folks in the industry regularly: Design has the power to grow your brand. In fact, we’ve proven that effective design can drive sales, and that design success can be predicted with more than 90% certainty.
So why is this relevant to TV advertising? Because design amplifies (or mutes) the impact of everything else in your marketing mix…. including TV ads. It’s the one common denominator. Even if there is a “star” featured on the ad, the package design gets as much and often more airtime.
Design took a leading role in most of yesterday’s CPG ads, but here are a few that stood out to us:
Frank’s Red Hot Sauce
This 45-second spot features Ludacris, a three-time Grammy winner, as well as several of his collaborators. Still, with all of that starpower, the package design had the most screentime… it was featured a whopping 75% of the time. (Sidenote: The CGI goat wearing sunglasses received some solid screentime as well.)
Oikos protein shake and Triple Zero yogurt
Kathryn Hahn and Derrick Henry on a San Francisco cable car… okay, Oikos, you have our attention. The unlikely pair made a great team, and still the camera seemed to love Oikos packaging, since it grabbed 56% of the screentime.
Nerds Juicy Gummy Clusters
This CGI-heavy spot features Andy Cohen with his colorful “taste bud,” a giant manifestation of the candy in question. From the pool to the tailor to the red carpet, the packaging was featured repeatedly—a total of 53% of the time.
Raisin Bran
William Shatner stars as “Will Shat” in this spot that goes heavy on the potty humor. The design and logo were seen throughout (nearly 57% of the ad), and we’ll admit it’s the first time we’ve ever seen a cereal-box bandolier in a Super Bowl commercial.
Pepsi Zero Sugar
Pepsi cleverly commandeered Coca-Cola’s polar bear for this spot—which included a nod to the viral “Coldplay couple” from a couple of years ago—but made sure its can design did much of the heavy lifting. The can was seen in roughly 70% of the commercial’s airtime.
Wondering if your design is ready for its close-up? Reach out to us to find out.
