I chose these ads because each contains a creative mechanism I can still explain without replaying the whole commercial. That is my standard for a useful retrospective: not whether the work was universally loved, but whether it gives another creative team a sharper question to ask. I did not work on the campaigns below, and I separate my personal judgment from the verified campaign record and any available effectiveness evidence.
Last reviewed: August 9, 2026
Super Bowl LV was unusual even by Super Bowl standards: brands were advertising through a pandemic, some familiar advertisers stayed away, and the game still offered one of advertising’s biggest stages. Looking back five years later is useful not because every campaign “worked” commercially—we do not have comparable incrementality data for all six—but because each one demonstrates a clear creative mechanism.
The useful question is not which ad was funniest. It is what each execution gives a strategist, copywriter, or creative team to borrow without copying the surface.
Key takeaway: The strongest lesson from this group is that a Super Bowl-sized budget does not replace a sharp mechanism. The memorable work gives the audience one thing to understand, repeat, pause, recognize, or argue about.
1. Amazon — Alexa’s Body
Amazon’s “Alexa’s Body” personified the voice assistant as Michael B. Jordan after a fictional employee imagines a more attractive “vessel” for Alexa. The joke is easy to explain, and the execution keeps returning to the product behavior: requests to Alexa become situations involving Jordan.
That matters because celebrity casting can easily become decoration. Here, the celebrity is the mechanism. The premise depends on the gap between an ordinary voice assistant and an absurdly desirable physical embodiment. The product remains inside the joke rather than sitting beside it.
What I would study: If you use a celebrity, ask whether the idea would collapse if that person disappeared. If not, the casting may be garnish rather than structure.
2. Cadillac — Edgar Scissorhands
Cadillac revived the world of Edward Scissorhands with Winona Ryder and Timothée Chalamet as Edgar Scissorhands. The story turns Edgar’s everyday difficulty using his hands into a reason to demonstrate the Cadillac LYRIQ’s hands-free Super Cruise feature.
The useful mechanism is not nostalgia by itself. It is nostalgia attached to a product problem. The character’s defining limitation creates a natural reason for the feature to matter. That gives the reference more strategic purpose than a simple cameo or remake.
Good to know: Familiar IP can buy instant recognition, but recognition is not the same as relevance. The stronger question is whether the borrowed world creates a product truth that the new brand can own in the moment.
3. Miller Lite — the 836-character URL
Miller Lite did not buy a national in-game beer ad in 2021. Instead, it targeted Michelob Ultra’s calorie positioning with an 836-character URL and invited people to type it during Ultra’s spot, arguing that the typing would burn the one-calorie difference between the brands.
This is a useful example of competitive reframing. Miller Lite turned the rival’s media moment into the timing device for its own stunt. The absurdly long URL was not just copy; it was the participation mechanic.
What I would study: When a competitor owns the obvious stage, look for a behavior around that stage you can own instead. A challenger does not always need to outspend the leader if it can redefine what the audience is doing.
Miller Lite campaign reference
4. Oatly — Wow No Cow
Oatly’s Super Bowl spot featured then-CEO Toni Petersson singing a deliberately simple “Wow, no cow” song in a field. The commercial looked radically underproduced compared with the celebrity-heavy spectacle around it, and reaction was predictably divided.
The important lesson is not “make a bad ad on purpose.” It is coherence. Oatly already used self-aware, unconventional brand behavior, and the company extended the moment with “I Totally Hated That Oatly Commercial” shirts. The response mechanism anticipated dislike and folded it back into the campaign.
Warning: Deliberate awkwardness is not a shortcut to distinctiveness. If the execution is strange but the strangeness is unrelated to the brand, product, or follow-through, you may only create confusion.
5. Reddit — five seconds that forced a second look
Reddit bought a five-second Super Bowl placement that flashed a dense text card after briefly resembling a car commercial. The message referenced the power of communities and leaned into the fact that viewers could not realistically read it in real time.
Reddit later said the spot appeared in nine of the top 10 U.S. metro markets and was created with R/GA in only a few days. The format turned a constraint—very little airtime—into the idea. Viewers had to pause, rewind, search, or encounter the ad again online to finish the experience.
Expert tip: Before adding more media, ask whether the format itself can create a behavior. Pausing, typing, searching, scanning, sharing, or replaying can sometimes carry more creative weight than another line of explanation.
6. Rocket Mortgage — Certain Is Better
Rocket Mortgage built two spots around Tracy Morgan repeatedly demonstrating the danger of being “pretty sure.” The premise converts an abstract financial proposition—certainty in home buying—into a sequence of escalating comic situations.
The campaign also had unusually strong evidence of audience preference for this list: USA TODAY’s 2021 Ad Meter ranked the two Rocket Mortgage executions first and second, while Amazon’s spot placed third. That is a popularity measure from the Ad Meter panel, not proof of sales lift or incrementality, but it is still useful evidence that the creative landed with that audience.
What I would study: If the proposition is abstract, dramatize the cost of its opposite. “Be certain” becomes much easier to remember when the audience repeatedly sees what “pretty sure” can get wrong.
Rocket Mortgage campaign reference
What these six ads have in common
The executions look very different, but their mechanisms are simple enough to describe in one sentence.
- Celebrity becomes product behavior, not decoration.
- Nostalgia creates a functional product problem.
- A rival’s media moment becomes the participation trigger.
- Brand self-awareness turns backlash into a continuation of the campaign.
- A five-second constraint forces viewers to interact with the message.
- An abstract promise becomes a repeatable comic contrast.
That simplicity is useful in creative development. If a team needs a paragraph to explain why the idea is interesting before anyone sees the execution, the underlying mechanism may still be weak.
A practical test for your next campaign
Before approving an idea, try five checks:
- Can you explain the mechanism in one sentence?
- Does the product or brand have a necessary role in the idea?
- Would the execution still be recognizable if the logo disappeared until the end?
- Is the audience being asked to do, notice, remember, or feel something specific?
- Are you separating creative admiration from evidence of commercial effectiveness?
Super Bowl work is unusually visible, expensive, and culturally loaded, but those questions travel well to ordinary campaigns too. The scale changes; the need for a clear idea does not.
For a broader view of the campaign principles behind this article, read 11 Innovative Marketing Campaigns from 2025 Worth Studying.
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