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Matthew Burns:
Hey everybody, it’s Stephen Semple and Matthew Burns back with a Super Bowl 25 ad, and I think we’re just going to run right into it so everybody can know what we’re talking about. Here it goes.

 

Speaker 1: It has been a banner year for the National Football League, or should I call it the National Food Ball League.
Announcer: From the very beginning, football has been a conspiracy to make us hungry.
Coach 1: And we’ll call this a pig skin. Make people crave bacon.
Speaker:Bacon
Speaker: Bacon.
Coach 2: And everybody loves bacon.
Speaker: I love bacon.
Speaker 1: They do anything to sell food.
Player 1: Coach, how come we only play on Sundays?
Coach 1: Because nobody’s eaten ice cream Saturdays, kid. Jeez.  So the Packers were named after Meat Packers.
Speaker 3: What should we call the fans, Coach?
Coach 1: Cheeseheads. Of course.
Speaker 1: Why do you think Buffalo got a team?
Speaker 4: These wings deserve a team.
Coach 1: Yeah, figure out a good team name for Buffalo, Bill. Buffalo… Buffalo…
Speaker 5: And their biggest game. Our championship will be a super cup.
Speaker 1: Can’t eat out of a cup, Ted, but a bowl. How about a Super Bowl? *everybody claps* And we’ll start naming new players after appliances.
Player 2: Hey coach, do I have to be called refrigerator?
Coach 1: Yes.
Speaker 1: And Peyton, he was a beef salesman…Omaha! Steak. Omaha! Steak. And they’re still playing us this year. We’re not even hiding it anymore. We got Super Bowl licks (LIX,) and the halftime show presented by an apple in a stadium named after…
Martha Stuart: A salad! *everybody laughs*
Gretta Gerwig: Matthew. Matthew!
Matthew McConaughey: Hey, sorry.
Gretta Gerwig: You want me to make a movie about a football conspiracy?
Matthew McConaughey: Yes.
Gretta Gerwig: No.
Matthew McConaughey: Come on Greta.
Gretta Gerwig: No.
Matthew McConaughey: Bacon’s in. Everybody loves bacon.
Speaker 5: No one believes that football is just some conspiracy to sell…
Announcer: Food! When Football makes you hungry, order Uber Eats!

Matthew Burns:
At the Wizard Academy, we learn about dualities, third gravitating bodies, and how everything’s connected. And I just think it’s amazing how the agency for Uber Eats went out of their way to find every connection to food that they could to try and make this ad work. I think they did it brilliantly. I know you have a favorite. What was your favorite little spot?

Stephen Semple:
I love the subtleties in this, and my favorite was “Bacon”. And “everybody loves bacon” and it’s Kevin Bacon. But what I love is they allowed you to miss things. He didn’t say, “Hey Kevin.” You had to recognize the voice and even the reference back to the appliance. Not everybody knows that reference, right? Football player. Oh, refrigerator. They were okay with the fact that you might not get the jokes, which are the best jokes.

Matthew Burns:
Dude, I love the way you said subtleties because even, Hey, why do you think Buffalo got a team? He said, what would we name a team in Buffalo, Bill? Buffalo… Buffalo… It’s there. It’s on the tip of your tongue. People honestly, if you know football at all, if you’re an NFL fan, you’re watching the Super Bowl and you’re seeing this ad, everybody’s going Bills, Bills, they’re answering it for you. They’re saying it in their mind. It was really, really well done. And even with the Bacon one, right at the very end, it’s like Kevin’s in because that was when the Kevin reference came in way at the very end of the commercial.

Stephen Semple:
Right at the very end, yes.

Matthew Burns:
So I thought it was brilliant. Again, a little bit longer of an ad in the Super Bowl. And again in the Super Bowl where, I mean I think an ad spot was like $8 million or something like that. Yes, a massive number. There was a ton of people who opted in to spend money on the Super Bowl ads. But I’m going to say of the Super Bowl ads, this is one of the few that actually stood out that actually did anything. And I don’t want to harp on them, but…

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, this year they were very disappointing because I’m not a football fan, but we talked about doing this. So I went onto YouTube and found all the Super Bowl ads, and I got to tell you, most of them were just… Often, they’re some of the best, most famous ads. And this year, they were very flat.

Matthew Burns:
Let us know in the comments. I want to hear from anybody who’s watching these, let us know, should we do our disappointing ads from the Super Bowl? Talk about which ones we found disappointing and why, because there’s a few of them that were so close but missed the mark for me. Michelob Ultra and Jeep, they both had close-to-really-good ads. They were good, but they weren’t what they could have been through the Super Bowl. Let us know. We’d love to do that for you guys.

Stephen Semple:
One of the things we got to recognize is people in things like the pizza business and whatnot will tell you that Super Bowl Sunday is their busiest day of the year. So  this whole idea of ordering food is a thing. If you were measuring the results on this ad as Uber Eats, by the time it’s coming on in halftime, if it’s a halftime ad or depending on when the ad happens, people will have already ordered their food.

So it’s not like you’re going to get a bump there, but it’s this whole frame of mind. People have ordered food, people are eating, so it is actually kind of interesting. You are hitting in that frame of mind and hitting it as you said, in a clever manner. It’s not about any features or benefits, but just the NFL is actually the National Food League and there’s this conspiracy. It’s kind of funny.

Matthew Burns:
God, yeah, “let’s call it the Super Cup and you can’t eat it of a cup, Bob,” which is a great line – “Let’s call it Super Bowl.” And then having smart choices, having Martha Stewart in the ad and making reference to Caesar being a powerful figure, even though they were talking about Caesar’s, the place, the restaurant chain, every little tiny choice that they made was on purpose. It was skillful. It brought us to the storyline.

One of the other reference points that I really liked was talking about the Packers. It was named after Meat Packers. So what are we going to call the fans? And we know the name. I mean, if you’re an NFL fan or if you’re Live the World because NFL speaks really loudly that Packers fans are called Cheeseheads. You already know that. But then the reference to that guy walking across the screen with cheese in his hand.

A big wedge of cheese, right? So that’s the thing. All these really specific choices, I mean, it was a minute and 30 second ad, so it’s a fairly long ad to run and to fill it up and to make each joke run into the next one really well and then tie it back. And then it’s this whole idea of him, Matthew McConaughey thinking that he wants to come up with a movie idea, bringing it back and hitting it home with that Kevin Bacon joke right at the end.

I think that Uber has done nothing but up its game every single year with the ads. And we should probably at some point go back and look at some of the previous ones. You and I have talked about them, we just haven’t done them on the show yet to talk about because they’ve continued up it. But this one to me was really the pinnacle of where they’ve been able to tie food to the everyday experience.

And I think that’s something that we don’t talk about enough is the whole idea of making the everyday experience. We talk about the  the unfamiliar to the familiar – making people recognize something, making them feel it. And it’s a shared experience that everybody has gone through. And I think you nailed it on the head when you said that the Super Bowl, it is powered by food and they know that they’re not going to get any revenue from it, but they’re going to make you think of whenever there’s a special event that you got to get some food, now you’re thinking about it. Do Uber Eats.

Stephen Semple:
Well, I actually think deep down inside, what they’re also hoping is anytime you think NFL that you think National Food League.

Matthew Burns:
Oh yeah, exactly. And if they’re smart… So Uber, if you’re listening, the advertising agency for Uber, Your next couple of ads have to be all about the National Food League. You got to remind people what you did at the Super Bowl running right up into the next season.

Stephen Semple:
And that would be brilliant follow-up ads to place in… again, not a football fan, so I don’t know if they do regular advertising in football games. They probably do. But if they did, yes, that would be the follow-up is continue to drive that home in regular season football games. Drive that idea, drive that idea, lean into it, own it, would be brilliant.

Matthew Burns:
And if the NFL was smart, they’d lean into it.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
Do you know what I mean? Get some of that ad budget towards Uber changing the acronym from National Football League to National Food League.

Stephen Semple:
So I’m going to put a plug in here. Uber, if you’re listening to this, we know a really great ad writer who can do this for you. And his name’s Matthew Burns.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, gee. Thank you. I appreciate that. No, guys, this was a lot of fun. Awesome. Well thank you once again. Another really good ad. Please guys, let us know about if you want us to poo all over the crappy ads from the Super Bowl, we’ve looked into that a little bit. Even give some what we would do to spice up some of the ones that almost made it. Anyway. Steve, any last words?

Stephen Semple:
Well, last thing is they again allowed people to miss some of the jokes, which is honoring the intelligence of your audience.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, there we go.

Stephen Semple:
And also recognizing that, especially with something like a Super Bowl ad, it gets replayed on YouTube and things along that lines, which means if somebody goes back to it, it allows people to return to it. And I think that that’s really great.

Matthew Burns:
Any advertiser, they’re banking on people now, going to YouTube and watching them again. So, no, I think you nailed it and the way you said it is honoring the intelligence of the audience. That’s a great point. Anyway, awesome. Thank you so much again, Stephen. This is great. We’re going to do another one next week, guys, like subscribe, tell people we love doing this. We want to come back. Talk to you guys later.

Stephen Semple:
Great. Thanks Matthew.

Matthew Burns:
See you.

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