Every February I watch the Super Bowl ads the same way, with a notebook and a running tally: which ones made the room go quiet, which ones made it laugh, which ones made me turn to whoever I was sitting with and say, “who made that?”
The ones that get remembered almost never win on logic. They win on feeling.
This is a Marketing & Communication post, and the lesson I keep returning to is that the Super Bowl, for all its spectacle, is the clearest annual reminder that emotional advertising outperforms clever advertising — every time.
The classic framing is Aristotle’s: ethos, logos, pathos. Credibility, logic, emotion. Most bad marketing I’ve seen over-indexes on logos — features, specs, reasons to believe — and treats pathos as a bonus. The Super Bowl inverts the stack. In the one room where an enormous audience is paying attention to ads on purpose, the brands that win lead with emotion, and let the rest fall in behind it.
The Jeep spot with Bill Murray a few years back was a perfect version of this. They put Murray back in the Groundhog Day universe, wrapped in a Jeep Gladiator, and the ad barely did any work to explain what the vehicle could do. It didn’t have to. The nostalgia did the work. The audience did the work. The product was the quiet beneficiary of an emotion the ad had borrowed from a shared cultural memory.
I’ve been in rooms where a creative director shows a spot like that and the CMO asks, “but what’s the call to action?” That’s the wrong question. The call to action in an emotional ad is feel something, remember us. If you ask a Super Bowl ad to drive a measurable lift in web traffic in the forty-five seconds after it airs, you’re going to be disappointed. If you ask it to embed a feeling in your brand’s equity that pays you back for the next three years — now you’re measuring the right thing.
The trap, and I’ve seen this too, is believing emotion is a shortcut for strategy. It isn’t. The ads that work are emotional because the brand already knows what it stands for. Jeep has spent decades building a thesis about freedom, memory, and Americana, and the Murray spot was a withdrawal from that equity account. Brands with no thesis that try to manufacture feeling produce the sentimental-slop ads you forget before halftime.
The Super Bowl isn’t telling us to be sappier. It’s telling us that when your brand has a real point of view, the most efficient way to communicate it at scale is through feeling, not argument. Logic informs. Emotion is what gets remembered.
Build the thesis first. Then let the feeling carry it.
