How Many People Does It Take to Create 1 Super Bowl Commercial?

Imagine a Super Bowl commercial flashes on your screen for 30 – 60 seconds. If you leave the room to get more guacamole; if you get distracted by a text; or you check IG, you’ll miss it. When you do, the work of everyone involved in coming up with the idea for the commercial, for making that idea a reality, everyone who paid for the commercial to air – all of their work is for naught.

How many people are we talking about? How many people make up the team responsible for a Super Bowl commercial on average? Take a guess.

• 2 people
• 5 people
• 10 people
• Dozens of people
• Hundreds of people

It takes a small army to make a Super Bowl commercial. Don’t believe me? Here’s a partial list of personnel likely to be involved:

• Clients (1-5)
• Account executive, Account Supervisor, Account Director
• Account planning/Brand Strategy
• Copywriter, Art Director, ACD, CD, GCD, ECD, CCO
• Experience Design
• Media team (2-4)
• Technology team
• Producers
• Casting Director
• Director (and DP)
• Video crew (lighting, shooting, set design, location scout, sound, music, editing, CGI, mastering)
• Testing vendor
• Social Media team
• PR team (2-5)

That’s a lot of people. But with so much money and exposure at stake, it’s common for an ad agency to invite teams from other agencies in their network to pitch their ideas. For example, when I was part of a creative team working on a Super Bowl spot at DDB LA, every single DDB office was invited to contribute ideas. Today, DDB has 54 offices in 19 countries. That’s why I say it takes a small army to create a Super Bowl spot and get it on the air.

How Long Does It Take?

Typically, the Super Bowl airs in February. But work on each Super Bowl commercial starts much, much earlier. In fact, work often starts as early as the summer of the previous year. Why does it take so long? Here’s the process – from the Creative team’s point of view:

THE PROCESS

• July – Get briefed, come up with dozens of initial concepts/ideas; pitch them as a keyframe and short descriptor
• August – Deliver initial scripts & storyboards
• Sep-Nov – Most ideas/scripts get killed; a few survive and need to be reworked; come up with more ideas (as keyframes & descriptors) and develop some into scripts with storyboards
• December – A handful of ideas are selected; animatics are created; Dial testing takes place
• January – Shoot & Edit; more dial testing of rough cuts
• February – Last-minute editing; Final selections made; Spot airs on Super Bowl (pray everyone sees it); hope to land on a top Super Bowl commercials list

K.I.S.S. –  Pitching Super Bowl Ideas 

What do the initial ideas look like? What form do they take when presented to the Creative Director/s who have the power to give them a thumbs up/down; to boost or crush your career? Do you need to be able to create a video to demonstrate the power of your idea? It would be great if you had the skills to create a sample video of your commercial. But the initial goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible – in rough form – to explore many, many directions. So that would mean coming up with lots of videos in a ridiculously short time frame. So initial ideas are usually presented in a K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) format.

The Idea in 1 Keyframe

In the image above, I created 1 keyframe and descriptor for 4 different Super Bowl commercials. Below are three of the finished Super Bowl 2018 commercials.

Here’s a short case study on the #1 Super Bowl commercial of 2018:

Like I said, 30 or 60 seconds is very little time. So the best Super Bowl ideas are simple. They have to be. They’re the shortest movies on the planet; stories that can be told in less time than it takes you to read this paragraph.

When coming up with a memorable Super Bowl commercial, it’s good to focus on one hero visual. One image that hints at the story the commercial tells. Distill the entire story to that one image – plus 10 words or less to describe the essence of the story being told. They image is called the keyframe. And coming up with it is harder than it sounds. Try coming up with 1 hero visual and 10 words or less for each of these three past Super Bowl commercials.

Haynes Baked Beans “Astronaut”

Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”

Skittles “Cat Lick”

Now try to reverse engineer this year’s Super Bowl commercials in your mind. What would the keyframe visual be? How would you write a 10-words or less descriptor?