The Patterns in Super Bowl Commercials
Super Bowl commercials capture our attention because they tend to be highly creative and well-produced. At $3.5 million dollars for a thirty second spot, Super Bowl advertisers need to create the best, most innovative commercials possible. To do that, they use patterns. Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered that 89% of 200 award winning ads fall into a few simple, well-defined design structures. Their book, “Cracking the Ad Code,” defines eight of these structures and provides a step-by-step approach to use them.
Here are the eight tools:
1. Unification
2. Activation
3. Metaphor
4. Subtraction
5. Extreme Consequence
6. Extreme Effort
7. Absurd Alternative
8. Inversion
Let’s see how yesterday’s 2012 Super Bowl ads fit these patterns.
The Unification Tool uses components of the medium or within the environment of the advertisement to convey the message. This Bridgestone commercial does a nice job of taking sports objects like balls and pucks and “unifying” them to the theme of rubber tires: