The final data on Super Bowl 2023 celebrity overkill: Datacenter Weekly
Also: How consumers feel about loyalty programs, macroeconomic news in a nutshell, and more.
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Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.
Super Bowl commercial celebrity overkill by the numbers
“Arguably, the biggest problem with this year’s batch of Big Game ads was not so much the lack of ideas, but the overreliance on a single idea: that you can bludgeon viewers into paying attention through the power of celebrity.” That assessment appears in the introduction to Ad Age’s “Super Bowl 2023 Ad Review,” which we published on Super Bowl Sunday.
Now, iSpot.tv is out with data that backs up our gripe. The TV measurement company says that nearly seven out of 10 (67%) of Super Bowl LVII commercials included celebrities—with many ads, of course, featuring multiple celebrities. The total celebrity count across all Big Game spots came in at 277.
Until Super Bowl LII in 2018, when the percentage of Big Game ads with celebrities hit 60%, the standard was for less than half of Super Bowl ads to feature celebs, iSpot noted.
For instance, in 2017, only 41% of Super Bowl ads leveraged celebrities; in 2011, only 26% did.
See if you can spot the celebrities from years past in Ad Age's Super Bowl ad archive
Previously: 5 funniest Super Bowl 2023 commercials, plus Doritos’ Jack Harlow boost: Datacenter Weekly
11.3%
That’s how much private brand sales grew in all outlets in the U.S. for the 52 weeks ended Jan. 1, 2023, compared with the prior year, according to the Private Label Manufacturers Association. Over that 52-week period, sales totaled $228.6 billion.
Beer sales dip leading up to the Super Bowl
“Super Bowl week did not appear to be a good one for the beer industry,” Ad Age’s Adrianne Pasquarelli and E.J. Schultz note in the latest edition of our “Marketing winners and losers of the week” post. “Sales volume fell more than 4% in the two weeks ending Feb. 12, reports Beer Marketer’s Insights, citing IRI data. The beer trade publication referenced recent comments by Molson Coors CEO Gavin Hattersley about ‘reasons for caution’ across the consumer landscape.”
Ad Age Best Places to Work 2023
In his introduction to Ad Age’s Best Places to Work 2023 package, Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson writes,
The best practices at the Best Places to Work turn out to be pretty straightforward:
Fair pay. Solid benefits.
Recruit and retain a diverse workforce. Keep staffing levels adequate so team members and teams can do their best work.
Provide good training and keep employees in the loop on how the business is doing. Tilt work-life balance a bit more toward life.
Easy to say—and hard to do. Ad Age Best Places to Work 2023 honors 50 companies for a job well done last year amid the challenges of a tight talent pool, uncertain economy and ongoing effects of the pandemic.
The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.
Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.
