And it follows, inferentially at least, that if one celeb delivers engagement, a few of them will deliver still more.
Another factor in play is a variant of an old adage: in for a penny, in for a pound. “If you’re shelling out $7 million for 30-second ad and you’re paying I don’t know how much in production, having a celebrity—or two or three or five—is probably worth it,” said independent media consultant Brad Adgate. After all, this is the big time, right?
Finally, there’s the fact that the Super Bowl is the last true mass-market media event left in the fractured America of today—and if a brand aims to keep 111 million viewers entertained, it helps to have mass-market entertainers. As brand consultant David J. Deal puts it: “Americans are addicted to celebrities and the Super Bowl is our ultimate fix.”
Sick of all these stars yet?
But all this celebrity stuffing raises a specter, too. If viewers become inured to, say, 10 famous faces in a single ad, does that mean that following year’s ad needs 12 faces? 15? When does it all become too much?
Depending on who you ask, that day is a long way off—or it might be here already.
“You do run the risk where you get immune to it, or it doesn’t add any value to add messaging or the product,” Adgate said. “But I don’t think we’re there yet. I think [advertisers will] keep doing it.”
Probably. But Merino believes that they should think twice. The Super Bowl, he said, is already suffering from what he calls the “cameo-ification” of advertising—too many celebs poking their heads into every spot. “It’s already jumped the shark,” he said.
“If you look over history and the ads that have usually ranked the best—very few of them are a smorgasbord of celebrities.”
And he’s right. Look back over the most popular Super Bowl ads and you’ll see surprisingly few VIPs.
For example, Coca-Cola’s legendary 1980 spot “Hey Kid, Catch!” features only Pittsburgh Steelers’ defensive tackle Mean Joe Greene and a young fan. Nike’s classic “Hare Jordan” from 1993 stars only Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. Other celebrated spots—including 1995’s famous Budweiser frogs, EDS’s “Cat Herders” from 2000 and E-Trade’s talking babies from 2008—have no famous faces at all.
There’d better be a good explanation for this
Since the trend of celebrity packing isn’t likely to disappear tomorrow, however, experts point out that the real issue isn’t so much casting too many stars in a given ad—it’s casting them without a good reason.
In 2022, Toyota ran a spot called “The Joneses.” A canny riff on “keeping up with the Joneses,” the ad featured some notable personages, all with the same surname, tooling around in their Toyota Tundras: Leslie Jones, Rashida Jones, Tommy Lee Jones. (And, in the kicker, Nick Jonas—phonetically close enough—at whom Tommy Lee Jones scowls, “Try to keep up, whoever you are.”)
