It’s Super Sunday again, and all the chatter is about the commercials—that and Taylor Swift. But every year, millions tune in for the ads. This year, a 30-second ad goes for $7 million. At that price, companies better have the perfect message.
Luckily, about a decade ago, a couple of business professors figured out what works. Spoiler alert: It’s narrative.
For “What Makes a Super Bowl Ad Super? Five-Act Dramatic Form Affects Consumer Super Bowl Advertising Ratings,” Michael Allan Quisenberry of Johns Hopkins and Michael Kevin Coolsen of UNC-Chapel Hill did content analyses of 198 Super Bowl commercials with some degree of narrative structure.
So what is “narrative structure”? Just turn to two old friends: Aristotle, the philosopher and author of The Poetics, about three centuries before Christ, and Gustav Freytag, the nineteenth-century German philologist and author of The Technique of the Drama. Aristotle posits a three-act structure, mapped on an arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. Freitag posits a five-act structure, mapped on a triangle, with an exposition, complication, climax, reversal, and denouement.
That is to say: Hook the audience, show some conflict, and resolve the conflict in a way that changes the hero.
Quisenberry and Coolsen theorized that narrative works better than arguments or evidence to engage and persuade audiences. They mapped the consumer favorability ratings of the 2010 and 2011 Super Bowl television commercials from the voting results of the SpotBowl.com and USA Today Ad Meter national ratings polls. Then, they assessed the engagement of viewers viewing ads structured with five formats: one-, two-, three-, four-, and five-act formats. The more acts, the greater the dramatic power—and the greater the viewer engagement.
| Acts | Sponsor and Title | SpotBowl.com | USA Today |
| 5 | Anheuser Busch: “Fence” | 4.07 | 7.82 |
| 4 | HomeAway: “Griswold’s” | 2.87 | 7.07 |
| 3 | Denny’s: “Chicken Warning” | 2.73 | 6.31 |
| 2 | Dockers: “No Pants” | 2.10 | 4.85 |
| 1 | GoDaddy: “Talk Show” | 1.64 | 4.82 |
The higher the scores, the more consumer engagement the ads produced.
So let’s see these ads:
Anheuser Busch’s “Fence”—a complete five-act drama
HomeAway’s “Griswold’s”—a four-act drama
Denny’s “Chicken Warning”—a three-act drama
Dockers’s “No Pants”—a two-part drama
GoDaddy’s “Talk Show”—a simple presentation of an idea
Let’s track the “Fences” add, act by act:
- Exposition: We are introduced to a young Clydesdale and a young calf and see that they are friends. The Clydesdale is, of course, the icon of Anheuser Busch, the maker of Budweiser and other beer labels.
- Complication: The two friends realize that a fence separates them.
- Climax: Years later, a mature Clydesdale runs along the field, pulling the Budweiser wagon. The grown steer sees his old friend and runs along the fence dividing the two.
- Reversal: The steer breaks through the fence.
- Denouement: No longer divided, the two old friends run together.
As Quisenberry and Coolsen note, a complete drama requires all those stages. In a 30-second ad, an act might last just a few seconds. As long as the stage of the story is clear, it doesn;t matter. All that matters is a complete journey.
As a contrast, Quisenberry and Coolsen look at another Anheuser-Busch add called “Ice Bottle,” which” also aired in the 2010 Super Bowl. The ad lacks any drama. “The ad shows a a bottle of Budweiser Select 55. The superior taste makes it select, and 55 calories make it the lightest beer in the world.” That’s it: No characters (unless the beer itself is the hero that saves the consumer from bad taste and/or too many calories). No action (moving a camera down a bottle is not action). As Quiseberry and Coolsen note: “No rising action, complications, turning point, falling action or release of tension occurs. Gustav Freytag’s dramatic arc never forms and a story does not develop. Some may say that the plot never ‘thickens.’”
One one ad, Anheuser Busch understands the power of a full drama. On another add in the same Super Bowl, the company seems oblivious to the power of drama.
