In this edition of Industry Focus: Consumer Goods, Emily Flippen and Dan Kline provide their insights into some of the commercials that were on display during the Super Bowl. They break down the costs and discuss whether the ads were successful in delivering the message and grabbing consumer attention. Find out why companies are spending top dollar to pay big-ticket performers, buy expensive premium air time, and more.
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This video was recorded on Feb. 4, 2020.
Emily Flippen: It's Tuesday, February 4th, and I'm your host Emily Flippen. If you're like most Americans, there's a really good chance that you sat down this past weekend, and, if you're like me, packed on a few pounds of wings while also yelling at the TV. But if you're maybe a more active investor, maybe you spent a little less time watching the game and more time watching for the companies that were advertising in-between the plays.
Joining me today to break down the business of Super Bowl commercials is Motley Fool contributor Dan Kline. Hey, Dan.
Dan Kline: Hey, there, Emily, how are you?
Flippen: [laughs] Good. I know that you watched the Super Bowl this past weekend, but maybe from an unconventional location?
Kline: Yeah. So I had a very different experience. I went on a little weekend cruise. A friend of mine, a woman named Amber Cole, plays piano for Royal Caribbean,and it was her last trip. So I had the very strange experience of watching the Super Bowl; I'm pretty sure not the American feed. I have since watched the American feed of the game, where I see all the commercials. But I was on a pool deck for much of the game with 500 to 600 other people, some of whom were crazy diehard fans, most of whom didn't care at all. And we're just sort of communally watching. And then I watched the fourth quarter from a piano bar. So it was definitely not your typical experience, but, of course, I sat down yesterday, and while I didn't watch the game part of it, I watched the commercials part of it so we could do this show.
Flippen: Yeah, I've never watched the Super Bowl and spent so much time analyzing the commercials, but it really got me thinking about how much money it costs to reach the audience that a Super Bowl does, and is it really worth it? You know, is getting Jason Momoa on screen, [laughs] paying him, paying for the commercials, is it really worth it?
Kline: So I think it can be. A Super Bowl commercial costs about $5.7 million per 30 seconds. It varies, how many you locked in, when you got them, but that's sort of like the stock number. And it can be worth it, because maybe you have the hit ad and every newspaper runs a story about how great your ad was, it's talked about on television. The sort of peripheral media attention can be enormous. But you brought up the Jason Momoa commercial. Now, I saw that commercial, you saw that commercial, it's in our notes, so I know you know who did it. But if we weren't preparing for a show, would you know what that was a commercial for?
Flippen: Oh, well, 100% not. I watched the commercial, and I was promptly terrified; it disturbed me, to be frank. [laughs] That's all I could think about the entire time.
Kline: I think one of the recurring themes of this Super Bowl was you watched an ad and at the end of the ad you're like, what? Am I supposed to buy something here? [laughs] Like, some of the car ads seem to be selling the concept of cars more so than specific cars. I'm talking the Porsche electric car ad, then the Hyundai electric car ad. And some of them were just trying so hard to be clever that you don't really know what the point was. And I'll talk about one that was very famous, the Mr. Peanut ad. Before the show, they kill off Mr. Peanut. They've been telling us they were going to do this. He dies bizarrely, sacrificing himself for his friends. And then, of course, they have, in the Super Bowl, a funeral for Mr. Peanut, where it turns out that he's reborn as baby Mr. Peanut. Which is, I guess, a Baby Yoda thing; I'm not entirely sure. But how does that sell you snacks? Like, do you directly remember what Mr. Peanut is a pitchman for? I don't think everyone does. So it seemed to me like they spent a lot of money to get a lot of criticism and not sell one thing of snacks.
Flippen: I kind of want to pass the question off to Austin, our producer, because as you were saying that, I was sitting here thinking, Austin didn't know what we were going to talk about when we came in the studio today. But I know that Austin watched the Super Bowl. So do you remember the Jason Momoa commercial? Can you tell us what they were selling?
Austin Morgan: I don't know what they're selling, but I really enjoyed the commercial. I thought it was hilarious. I don't know what they're selling, but it was a great idea.
Kline: Yeah. But I think some of these companies outdo themselves. I mean, the Snickers commercial was stupid. But it was kind of a parody of the old Coke commercial, and at least at the end of it, you went, "Oh, oh, I remember Snickers, I haven't had a Snickers in a while, maybe I'll go get one." It wasn't great, but it was acceptable.
Flippen: Well, let's think about risky ads too, because when I saw the Snickers commercial, the first thing -- so, for anyone who obviously isn't as in tuned with commercials as we are, the Snickers commercial is essentially them feeding the world a giant Snickers bar and that fixing everything. It reminded me of the infamous Pepsi commercial, where they give the policeman a Pepsi and it fixes violence in the world. It felt that way. Like, feed the world a Snickers and everything is better.
Kline: Yeah. And look, I'm pretty sure a Snickers being dropped into a hole, that's just not how anything works, [laughs] like, it was just a very strange thing, but they're there to be talked about. Like, you have to wonder. And it's something I've talked about a hundred times, both on shows and at night with my wife. If you're Coca-Cola, why do you need to advertise Coca-Cola? Who doesn't know what Coca-Cola is? Like, I get it, in this show they had the new Energy product, I actually saw Coca-Cola Energy at CES. I enjoyed it. So I actually went out to find some, and it wasn't all that available. I assumed, since it's been in a Super Bowl ad, it's now going to be pretty easy to buy. But that ad served a purpose. Your friends at Coca-Cola have a new product, here's what it does. That makes total sense.
But when they just run ads that are, like, "Hey, remember Coca-Cola?" Well, yeah, of course I do, [laughs] like, there's no -- it doesn't connect well to me, it doesn't seem like most of this money is well spent, but I do think you're taking the chance at hitting the lottery of having this sort of a hit commercial, but even then, everyone is talking about the Bill Murray Groundhog Day ad. And I know what it's for, it was a Jeep ad, but it was really more just like a fun, revisit to Groundhog Day. It didn't do a lot to sell me a Jeep.
Flippen: Yeah. And going back to some of the numbers that you mentioned. With commercials costing somewhere between $5.5 million to $6 million per 30 seconds. When you extrapolate that out, about 120 million Americans watched the Super Bowl this year. That's projected. But that means about $0.05 to $0.06 per viewer; and that's not including the cost of production. So the cost that it takes to pay these famous actors and actresses to come on and film and produce that entire commercial. A lot of people will pay agencies actually, who are professionals at making Super Bowl commercials to do it. And those are all costs.
So just the slot itself costs $0.05 to $0.06 per viewer. And the average broadcast TV slot normally costs $0.01 to $0.03 per viewer. So you can tell just from those numbers alone that a lot of these businesses are relying on people like us, on a podcast right now or CNN or CNBC or whoever it may be, [laughs] running stories about their ads. It's kind of comical.
Kline: And they do, and it makes sense. And the reality is, it's a great way to launch a new product. So if you didn't know there was a Black Widow movie coming out, you know now. I had no idea that there had already been eight Fast & Furious movies, so the commercial for the ninth one was [laughs] illuminating in many ways. They might have skipped two or three and just numbered them differently. I'm not entirely sure. So those things make sense. Even some of the weird tie-ins. The Super Bowl long Tide Pod ad did a pretty good job making you remember Tide Pods, while it also did some things like remind you there was a Wonder Woman movie coming out soon. So some things do work, but it has to be something that connects.
You know, look, if people prebuy tickets and there's more opening weekend interest in a movie, well, that's huge dollars. Like, your $10 million, if you spent $5 million buying it and $5 million producing the ad -- I'm just making up a budget -- you could clearly make that up by increasing interest in your thing. That certainly tracks out for products, but I question whether that makes sense for an electric Porsche, which has a very, very specific audience. How many of those 120 million people, Emily, do you think can buy an electric Porsche?
Flippen: Very, very few.
Kline: And yes, only a relative few have to buy it for the ad to make sense compared to, say, Snickers. But I still feel like there would be a directly better way to target those customers. And I do think there's some vanity to running Super Bowl ads. If you're an agency, this is kind of where you want to be. So there's a lot of pressure to spend this money, so you can win awards and talk about ads and be the hit at the game. A lot of people get fired for making these kind of marketing decisions.
Flippen: Yeah. I want to get into some of these specific companies that we saw really going heavy-handed with Super Bowl ads this year.
But before we get into it, I want to remind all of our listeners that, if you're looking for more stock ideas and recommendations, you can always check out our Stock Advisor service, you'll get stock recommendations from David and Tom Gardner every month, their Best Buys Now and a whole lot more. You can just go to if.fool.com. And we've got a special 50% discount for the listeners, so you can check it out at if.fool.com.
So Dan, let's talk about some of the themes and companies that seem to come hard this year. The one thing that stood out immediately to me -- and they ran pretty quickly after kickoff -- is Walmart.
Kline: I thought the Walmart ad was kind of an interesting choice. So Walmart ran an ad featuring a lot of, let's call it celebrity cameos, largely space based. [laughs] And the goal of the ad was to show you that they had curbside pickups. So you could fly in from Mars, and as long as you were at the curbside, you could pick it up. And I understand that curbside pickup has been a big growth area for Walmart, it's very competitive with Amazon and other local players and with Instacart. The problem with it is, is if I'm a Walmart customer, it would feel to me that the best way to promote curbside pickup would be to have curbside pickup, because I would see it as I walk by it on the way to the store. And if I'm not a Walmart customer, I don't feel like I'm going to stop shopping at Whole Foods and start shopping at Walmart because Walmart ran a funny ad that had the aliens from some movie I don't remember in it. It felt to me, like, I get it, it's an important part of your business, but why are you advertising something that any customer of yours almost certainly has physically seen even?
Flippen: That's actually really funny you say that. Because when I watched the Walmart ad, I actually felt the exact opposite way. I feel like Walmart misses a lot of consumers that go and purchase stuff either online or they go to Target, whatever that may be, they've lost a lot of their core consumers as they've moved online. And I think maybe a lot of people don't typically go into a Walmart, and so they would never think that they could order, yeah, curbside pickup from a Walmart the same way they do from other stores or have stuff delivered with the Amazon Fresh or whatever it may be. And so my impression was that was actually kind of an interesting ad because it might have informed people that curbside pickup is widely available when they didn't already know that. But yeah, to your point, I mean, if you're a frequent Walmart shopper, you are probably already aware.
Kline: Yeah. I mean, so you're arguing -- and maybe you're right -- that there's a lapsed Walmart audience that's been driven to other places for convenience. Maybe they like Walmart, but they have Instacart, so they were getting delivery from, in my case it will be Publix. Maybe they're Target fans and Target does ship, and they have delivery. So that's possible. But I don't feel like the customer who's made a decision, which is pretty much most customers. I think you know if you like Walmart or Target. I will tell you, I'm a Target customer who will only, very begrudgingly go to Walmart in this part of Florida, South Florida, because they're not particularly nice. But near our house at Disney is a beautiful Walmart, so while I would prefer to go to Target, if somebody else wanted to go to Walmart, I guess, I would go with them because it's a very well-done Walmart. So I don't see them changing a lot of opinions, but it was sort of a clever ad.
Flippen: So we're talking a lot about ads you didn't like. Were there any companies that you thought did the Super Bowl the right way?
Kline: Yeah, I thought the Google ad was great. So the Google ad was an older gentleman, and it showed him asking Google to bring up memories of his clearly deceased wife. And it was very moving and it was sort of meant to be happy, he was looking at wedding pictures, but it was showing how someone who, you wouldn't think of as a typical computer user -- you know, a much older man -- using Google in a very simple way, interacting with its assistant. And he did some stuff I didn't know you could do with Google. Frankly, I don't know if on a Mac, I can do those things, but at some point perhaps I'll try it out. So it really did show, like, a viable use, a reason you would go to this product in a very touching way.
But also, most people have photos in their computer they need to organize, most people have dates and other things they want to remember. And this was, like, sort of the first build-out of, like, OK, we all use these assistants to play music or listen to podcasts, but there's so many things we're not using them for. And here are different ways, this older gentleman is using it. And, yeah, that one I really enjoyed.
Flippen: That's so interesting, because I don't disagree with that analysis at all, but I will say, there's a time and a place for sad ads. Super Bowl, to me, just seems, like, read the room, read the room here, nobody [laughs] -- you know, we're all a little too far into our beers and eating wings with a group of people that maybe we're not that close with. No one wants to be teary-eyed in front of their friends.
Kline: Okay. Admittedly, I saw that ad for the first time alone on my couch yesterday, so yeah, you're right. I can see this sort of brings the mood down, but it was more touching than it was sad, it wasn't like, here's our 60-second tribute to Kobe Bryant, it was definitely implied that the guy was OK and he was just enjoying seeing these memories. But that was one where the commercial worked and it connected me to the product.
There are some other ads, and I hate to keep being negative, but the Bud Light Seltzer ad with Post Malone. Now, I'm not the target audience for Post Malone -- I barely know who this is -- but apparently he famously likes Bud Light, which it was not in any way explained. And the commercial was dumb but it did tell me that Bud Light now makes a seltzer. And if I was the type of person who drank Bud Light Seltzer, which maybe I am, I don't know, I've never tried one. That's good to know. And when I'm in a store, if I'm looking and I see Truly and White Claw, and maybe I'll get a Bud Light Seltzer. So it wasn't a great ad, but it was very effective in letting you know, hey, there is a new product here, so the next time you go to the store, maybe people wrote that down, "Try Bud Light Seltzer."
Effective in a way that some ads that I love, the Microsoft ad featured -- and I apologize if I'm saying this wrong -- Katie Sowers, who's the first female coach in the Super Bowl; she's one of just a very small group of women coaches in the NFL. And it sort of showed her journey. And I think it tied into her using a Microsoft product, but do you know?
Flippen: I definitely don't.
Kline: Yeah, I mean, I think there was a Surface involved and the NFL has a deal with the Surface. But there was nothing about the commercial that said to me, "Get a Surface, not an iPad, here's why." I'm pretty sure Microsoft did not particularly help her advance through her football career, and it wasn't implied that it did. So to me it was like, why did you run that ad? Like, it was really nice, but, like, put it on YouTube, you don't need to spend $5.6 million to be nice and not push a product.
Flippen: I'll tell you what, I love filming these podcasts with you, Dan, because inevitably something you say gets Austin riled up.
Kline: [laughs] Oh! Oh! Austin, is my not knowing who Post Malone is kind of a problem?
Morgan: It's pretty surprising, he's like everywhere, but I really like the Bud Light Post Malone commercials. I thought they were really funny.
Kline: Here's the thing, I know who he is by sight. He was on Saturday Night Live, my son likes him, I just don't particularly know his music. I could probably describe his face tattoos a little bit, because he's obviously a distinctive-looking person. But I just think it goes back to, at least Bud Light remembered the goal is to sell Bud Light Seltzer.
And I would point to another ad that was sort of clever that I take some issues with. So there was a Cheetos ad, and I think it was for Cheetos Popcorn, not actual Cheetos, but the premise was that Cheetos gets stuff in your hands and you make a mess everywhere. And I'm not so sure that's a positive for Cheetos. Like, you could eat Cheetos and have a napkin, you don't have to track things all around. And it was a little bit playful, but it also sort of reminded me as a parent why you don't get Cheetos for young kids.
Flippen: I know at some point we're going to have to move on, and I don't want to harp on this too much, but you're completely wrong about the Cheetos commercial. [laughs] If you're the person who's eating Cheetos, you eat Cheetos especially because they get on your fingers. And you get to have that wonderful experience of licking all the delicious Cheetos fluff off your fingers. I love those commercials. [laughs]
Morgan: I love Cheetos. [laughs]
Kline: I will share with the two of you that there is a store -- and I don't know if it's nationwide, but we have a handful of them in Florida. It's called Bulk Nation, and you can buy bulk Cheetos dust. So no Cheetos, just the dust. I guess you can assemble your own Cheetos at home [laughs] or theoretically you could use it as, like, an ingredient. So if you like, I can send each of you an unlabeled three-pound bag of Cheetos dust and [laughs] after all the authorities clear it, I'm sure that one works great.
Flippen: [laughs] I'll tell you what, Dan, don't offer that, because I will 100% take you up on the three pounds of Cheetos dust and then promptly eat them in a matter of maybe a week.
Morgan: I wonder if you could, like, dust chicken with Cheetos dust? Could you use those like a --
Kline: There are some recipes that call for that. And I actually think you probably can buy actual Cheetos dust in, like, restaurant quantities because I've seen Cheetos-dusted chicken and fish on menus, and I don't think they're disassembling Cheetos to do it. So while that's probably not available in the regular supermarket for you and I, restaurants have access to pieces and supplies. Like, if your ice cream has Nestle's Crunch in it, you can buy like a commercial-grade, already-crushed Nestle's Crunch, you don't have to unwrap individual bars and smash them in. [laughs] Though, that sounds like fun.
Flippen: Yeah, Dan, this is revolutionizing our listeners' lives right now. [laughs]
Kline: Yeah, well, I want to -- before we end this, there is one commercial that really bothered me, and it's a company I really like. So I don't own any, but T-Mobile, I'm a big fan of, and at some point, I will probably correct that and buy some T-Mobile. It's a company I really believe in. Strong leadership, they have a better product, they charge less for the product, they're very honest with you. And they ran an ad about their 5G network and they called it a nationwide 5G network. And I don't want to insult T-Mobile -- and I read through everything on their website today -- but they have a smattering of 5G across the country and a very limited amount of devices that can use it. And it was basically a commercial for something that they don't do -- and that they will; it's coming. But it was a major disconnect for me.
Flippen: Yeah, I'm not going to lie, that also bothered me. As somebody who works in finance, one of the biggest questions we get from listeners of our podcast and from subscribers to our subscription services is about 5G. 5G has been such a hot topic for investors and consumers alike that that commercial by T-Mobile made it seem like they have 5G across the country. And in fact, they do have 5G in locations, nobody can debate that, but it's not the 5G that consumers think about when they think about 5G. So 5G, the promise of it is to be 100 times faster than 4G, and they do that via small cell receptors that are placed really conveniently close to you. And companies like Verizon and AT&T and China Mobile in China, these are companies that have spent a lot of time and a lot of money actually trying to get the technology and the permits to put these small cell receptors all over the country to provide 5G to their consumers in those locations. Which is why they're not nationwide yet.
However, what T-Mobile did is they came in and they upgraded their current locations, their current receivers, upgraded them to 5G and then said, they have 5G all over the place. It's a little misleading to investors, because they're saying that the new 5G network for T-Mobile is about 20% faster than 4G, whereas other networks, which are actually spending the time and the money to build out the 5G infrastructure across the country, that has the potential to be upwards of five times faster than 4G. So it's not the same product that they're comparing to.
Kline: So I'm OK if they had a much faster new network that was truly nationwide that was widely available on, well, iPhones, I would be OK with it being twice as fast as what you have now, because that would probably be pretty good in most cases. I've watched movies on my phone on the T-Mobile network and it's fine. So twice as fast would be good. My biggest issue here is that, you're the company that has staked its reputation on being honest, no overages, no contracts, no hidden fees. And then you put out an ad that's deceptive. I mean, there's no other way to look at it. And I'm sure I'm going to hear from the public relations people telling me otherwise, but they're promising something they don't have. And look, there can be disagreements; they are telling me Fast & Furious 9 is a movie I want to see, and I can promise you, it isn't. [laughs]
So but that's a disagreement. Whether or not you have nationwide 5G, that might be open to debate on your determination of what 5G is, which is not a legal standard, I believe, it just means fifth generation. But they don't have that, they have a smattering of it. They have a truck that drives around and demonstrates it. It just seems like very off-brand. And with their CEO, John Legere, leaving, it made me question, sort of, "Oh! Oh! Is the new management going to sort of be more of a typical phone company?"
Flippen: Well, on that note, it's going to be interesting to watch where T-Mobile goes from here, right? How many people sign up and then are feeling deceived because their iPhone doesn't get 5G in their location?
Kline: And all they could have said is, we're building it out or coming soon. They didn't really make a lot of specific promises, but they did promise something new, and they don't have something new in most places. And again, I'm a customer, I like T-Mobile, it has saved me a lot of money. I think they're a good company to do business with, but I think they went for hype a little bit more here.
And it's the weird one. A lot of ads you couldn't tell what they were pushing; this one explained to you what they were pushing. The other ad -- I'm going to say I have a question about, maybe you can answer it -- the avocados-from-Mexico ad. Now, I'm not an avocado person, it's just not a food I like all that much. But if you go to the grocery store, are there multiple kinds of avocados and you choose the ones from Mexico? Like, what are they advertising here?
Flippen: That's a very good question. I feel a little discriminated against that you assumed, as a 25-year-old millennial, I would be eating a lot of avocados, but in fact I do. [laughs]
Kline: I actually just assumed that most people besides me like guacamole and I don't. [laughs]
Flippen: Love it. It's a really good question. I have never particularly sought out an avocado from Mexico. But Hass avocados, are those only from Mexico? Maybe that's what you're trying to get across?
Kline: Yeah. I mean, I understand when -- I think it was last year, there were commercials for a specific brand of pistachios. Because when you go, pistachios are sold in jars or bags and you look and you could buy Planters, you could buy whatever the brand that spent $5.5 million, and I don't remember it, from last year is. And that makes sense. There is some branding involved. It goes back to the Bud Light Seltzer. There are multiple kinds of hard seltzer. So Bud Light has a customer base that might have opted to try other kinds of hard seltzer, and they might be very excited to know, "Oh, hey, this company who's beer-like, now has a hard seltzer; I bet I'd like that."
But in some of these cases, I don't know, maybe that avocados from Mexico ad is more for the grocery chain buyer who's watching. But that one felt like a big miss to me. And the Hyundai ad, with Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, also took a long time before you figured out what that was for. And I'm not sure 58 seconds of 60 seconds of ads should be the two celebrities hanging out and then you get 2 seconds of, oh, wait, it's for a car.
Flippen: Yeah. I guess that's a good point about those ads in particular. But I have a question for you, so moving forward, you know, you're kind of looking at 2021 now, Super Bowl next year, do you think ads are still a big thing, or do you think eventually the hype will be overblown and people will just accept the fact that these ads are no longer anything special, they're just ads?
Kline: No. So I think what helps the Super Bowl is there's not nearly as much destination television anymore. A lot of the popular shows, let's say, The Mandalorian on Disney+, yes, it was released on a weekly schedule, but it's not on a traditional network, no advertising. The award shows are not as popular as they once were, for the most part. So live sports, especially live sports like the Super Bowl or the Masters or things that can have a massive audience, they're kind of rarer and rarer opportunities. So I think we're going to see ad prices go up for a few years, because if you're a company that has a big ad budget and you look at the television landscape, other than a very small handful of shows, we as a country, a highly rated show is no longer getting 30 million people. It's pretty much only football that does those kind of numbers.
So even if you like, I don't know, This Is Us or The Walking Dead, those shows are getting, you know, 10 to 12 million for This Is Us, maybe 3 to 4 million for The Walking Dead. People are DVR-ing, they are not watching live. Everybody watches the Super Bowl live. You don't have to be a sports fan, you're probably some place that the Super Bowl is on. I'm not entirely sure if other channels even show stuff during the Super Bowl [laughs] because we're all watching it. I mean, nobody counterprograms the Super Bowl anymore. There used to be the MTV half-time show that would sort of try to drag you in there; now there's sort of an unspoken agreement to not do that.
But, yeah, I see this as becoming more and more of an opportunity, but it's a major risk-reward. If you're Coca-Cola, you can afford to make a mistake. It's not even that bad if Coke's in the ad that people like the least; it still gets their product talked about. But if you're a company, you know, a smaller company, a start-up -- and there weren't any pure digital start-ups this year -- but you're in a position where you're spending a huge chunk of money and it might not work if you're not one of the more popular or less popular ads.
I think we also saw this year -- and it's something we meant to talk about at the top of the show -- I don't feel like anybody took any big risks this year. One of the old strategies used to be to release an ad that the network won't show. And then you have to tone down your ad and everyone goes online to see the original ad. We didn't see any of that, we didn't really see any limit pushing as far as I can tell.
Flippen: Well, you could argue that Mr. Peanut was probably as limit pushing as it came this time. Their ad did not run because of Kobe Bryant's unfortunate death. And they almost used that as a publicity stunt though, by saying they're pulling the ad because it seemed insensitive and then relaunching Baby Nut.
Kline: Yeah. Look, I don't know what the original plan was. I thought it was most likely that Planters, which has a more famous mascot than it does a brand, I did not think they were getting rid of Mr. Peanut. It seemed very logical to me that there was going to be some sort of rebirth. [laughs] And Baby Yoda has made baby characters very popular. So I mean, I'll give them credit. The second half of the ad, the half that aired during the Super Bowl, it was pretty cool to see Kool-Aid -- Kool-Aid Man -- as his formal name would be -- and, I believe it was, Mr. Clean. So you did get a couple of tie-ins that were kind of fun. Those are product mascots; they would go to a funeral of a product mascot. But that gimmick was actually used across other ads where you saw different characters from different things popping up. So there was a bit of a sameness to it. And in the end, are you buying peanuts because of that ad? I'm just not.
Flippen: That's a good point. And it will be interesting to watch to see where that goes in the future. I'm looking forward to next year's Super Bowl where we can dissect the ads then. Dan, thank you so much for coming on and joining us.
Kline: Thanks for having me.
Flippen: Listeners, that does it for this episode of Industry Focus. If you have any questions or just want to reach out and say "Hey," shoot us an email at [email protected] or tweet us @MFIndustryFocus.
As always, people on the program may own companies discussed on the show, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against any stocks mentioned, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear.
Thanks to Austin Morgan for his work behind the glass today. For Dan Kline, I'm Emily Flippen. Thanks for listening, and Fool on!
