Most people can’t remember what they had for breakfast yesterday, never mind the brands that advertised in the Super Bowl almost a year ago. But for marketers spending big bucks on the big game, lasting brand awareness is a major goal.
“As a CMO, you’re spending so much money on these commercials, and you’re in a highly competitive environment,” Rick Miller, a partner at marketing analytics company Big Chalk, told Marketing Brew. “You’re not just competing with other people in your category…because you want people to remember what you did to build that unaided awareness further down the line.”
With this year’s Super Bowl lineup set and the game less than two weeks away, Big Chalk exclusively shared with Marketing Brew its research into some of last year’s most memorable ads that could offer insights into how to measure success in 2025.
Be aware: One important metric for marketers is unaided brand awareness, aka the share of people who can remember a brand that advertised in the Super Bowl without a list to choose from.
That’s exactly what Miller asked a sample of more than 1,600 US consumers to do 36 hours after last year’s Super Bowl broadcast. Nerds, which ran its first Super Bowl ad in 2024, was among the brands that performed best by that metric, Miller said. Since the brand is a Big Chalk client, Miller said he tracks its unaided awareness all year, and the firm clocked an increase of more than 50% the Tuesday after the game.
Nerds’s unaided awareness also saw an increase among people who didn’t watch the game, suggesting that the spike among viewers “had some halo effect” on other consumers, Miller wrote in a report about the research. Part of that success had to do with timing, he told us, since the Nerds brand was “already on the upswing” around the time of its Super Bowl ad.
Matchmaker: Increasing brand awareness isn’t the only way to gauge the success of a Super Bowl campaign. Miller also tested a handful of last year’s spots for “proper attribution,” which he said is the share of consumers who can correctly match the celebrity star or plot of a commercial with the brand behind the ad.
Proper attribution can serve as an indication of engagement, he wrote in the report, which might be especially important for Super Bowl advertisers that already have high brand awareness. By that metric, “State Farm and Arnold Schwarzenegger were the big winners” last year, Miller wrote, with a proper attribution percentage of 56%.
Doritos scored similarly, with 54% proper recall, and FanDuel, Uber Eats, CeraVe, Popeyes, and M&Ms all earned scores above 37%, which Miller said was a strong percentage.
Bigger ≠ better: The quality of the plot and popularity of the celebrity both play a role in the making of a memorable ad, Miller said. There’s a 63% correlation between the quality of an ad’s plot and viewers’ ability to remember it, according to Big Chalk, while celebrity popularity correlates at about 50%.
But the size of the brand hardly correlates at all, Miller said—potentially good news for the more than half a dozen first-time Super Bowl advertisers set to appear in this year’s game.
“If you’re a smaller brand and you can scrounge up the budget to get into the Super Bowl, and you get your story right, and you get a decent celebrity, you can do really well,” he said. “You don’t have to be State Farm, you don’t have to be McDonald’s.”
This report was originally published by Marketing Brew.