Fred Again.. and The Super Bowl: The Power of Ingredients, Failures, and Invitations
The Super Bowl: Why Is Everything So Similar?
For marketers, The Super Bowl is simultaneously one of the most powerful tools to break through the clutter… and one of the most competitive environments out there.
In a media landscape that is more fragmented than ever, football is the last bastion of media monoculture. The NFL claims that 60% of all people in the entire freaking country watched The Super Bowl last year and, oh-by-the-way, of the most watched prime-time telecasts of 2023, 23 of the top 25 were NFL games. NFL games are the last water cooler around which we all gather (well, except for around 25 seconds).
Given that The Super Bowl is the last one-stop shop for consumers’ attention, it’s not surprising that brands are willing to pay $7 million for 30 seconds of air time. What is surprising, however, is the degree to which these big brand bets all look alike.
The staggeringly high stakes of Super Bowl ads lead to a marketing version of The Innovator’s Dilemma. If there is a formula on the table that has kind-of-sort-of worked for Super Bowl ads for years, are you going to be the CMO who chooses to deviate from that formula and risk their job on a different and unproven approach? Yeah, probably not. So that’s why we’re starting to see another lookalike parade of superficial smiling celebrity cameos, all of which feel increasingly like the product of GenAI prompts. After all, nobody ever got fired for working with Beyonce.
Amidst all of this sameness, there is a different approach to Super Bowl ads (and marketing in general) that is being almost completely overlooked. And, as I’ve been someone who has helped make Super Bowl ads but also worked in startups for whom a Super Bowl ad was about the last thing in the world that seemed relevant to us, I believe this approach is exciting for brands at any stage or size.
To dig into this approach, let’s look to Fred Again.. — an EDM superstar and Grammy winner who is, as they say, having a moment.
The Brutal Challenge of Breaking Through: in Music and Marketing
When I first heard a song by Fred Again.., it was– wouldn’t you know it– on a Peleton bike. And while I enjoyed the track, it kind of washed over me without leaving much of a memory. It was, I’d argue, kind of like one of those funny-yet-ephemeral celebrity-studded Super Bowl ads.
The fleeting nature of this Fred Again.. track is a symptom of just how hard it is for a song to break through in today’s music landscape. As shown in the chart above, in the past year there were ~40.4M new tracks released: nearly 112,000 per day. If this weren’t daunting enough, the projections are that this will soon skyrocket to 275,000 new songs per day– and that’s largely presuming that AI-generated music is largely kept at bay and doesn’t continue to do things like double the number of songs on Spotify overnight. Given this relentless onslaught of oversupply, it’s no wonder that nearly 25% of songs on streaming platforms have never been listened to once.
This brutal oversupply of music is echoed in the world of marketing. Though it’s a tricky thing to measure, I think it’s reasonable to say that the average person gets exposed to 10,000 commercial messages per day. It’s harder than ever for a song to break through, and it’s harder than ever for a brand to break through– even on The Super Bowl.
The Waning Power of Your Why
In addition to the sheer oversupply of marketing that competes for consumer attention, a big reason why it is more difficult than ever for brands to break through is that most everyone (on the Super Bowl and beyond) is largely running the same playbook.
At the root of a lot of sameness is the diagram above. For the better part of 20 years, Simon Sinek has influenced the thinking of virtually every brand out there. He argues that the way to truly lead, and to break through, is through the power of your “why.” Believing that “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” Sinek has inspired marketers across every industry to focus on their brand’s purpose.
However, I believe that in today’s world the power of your brand purpose as a way to break through the competitive clutter is waning. This isn’t because Sinek’s argument is any less correct than it was all those years ago, it is because of the sheer number of brands who have become overly reliant upon their “why” as the way that they can break through that clutter.
Given this clutter, I’m not arguing that brands should lose touch with their “why.” Rather, I’m arguing that too many brands skip that middle circle– their “how” — and miss out on what can be a marketing lever that creates a multiplier effect on their “why”. And when I think about the power of the “how” I am not talking about product benefits or perceived differentiators. I’m talking about how it actually all comes together.
And when Fred Again.. performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk, he showed us all how this can work.
A Framework for Unleashing the Power of Your Brand’s How
I’d like to propose a framework that I think marketers in any industry can use to harness the power of their “how” to invigorate their “why,” and break through the competitive clutter.
My framework explains three exciting things that can happen when you unleash the power of your how:
- Ingredients become visible
- Failures become foundations
- Experiments become invitations
For each of these pillars, I’ll suggest a prompt that I believe any brand can put into action. And to spice it up a bit, I’ll throw in a quick “what if?” idea that imagines how a forthcoming Super Bowl ad could be different if brought to life through this framework.
Ingredients Become Visible
In his Tiny Desk performance, Fred Again.. plays the marimba, the vibraphone, the piano, and even the office table as he sings and loops both audio and video… all at the same time, and all live. The performance is captivating, but the virtuosity of it all is only part of the point.
The broader lesson of this performance is that by taking once-invisible ingredients and making them compellingly visible, I no longer just hear his songs– I hear their how. I now have a connection with the back story and craft of his songs that is unique.
In the world of electronic dance music, it’s even harder to break through than it is in music more broadly. Several levers that bands use to break through aren’t available to EDM artists: there are typically very few lyrics (if any), you’re (almost always) creating your songs by sampling the works of others, and even when you are performing live there is only so much you can do to distinguish yourself when you’re standing behind turntables and laptops. But by making his ingredients visible, Fred Again.. shatters the competitive clutter through the power of his how.
At this point, I know what you’re probably thinking. You might appreciate this new(-ish) artist, and you might have enjoyed his performance (really, you should watch it). But you might not think that your brand has much by way of a marimba. However, your brand does have ingredients. These ingredients might be ideas, they may be lines of code, they might be physical parts, they might even be actual food ingredients. And the drama behind the ingredients of your brand is almost certainly invisible to your customers. If you can bring to life the way these “ingredients” come together to create your product, you now have a unique “how” to help your brand break through.
Here’s a quick Super Bowl “what if.” Currently, Kia is planning on introducing their new electric SUV by proclaiming that it’s “electric like you’ve never seen.” And they’re going to make this claim with the help of an ice skater because… well, I have no idea. But what if they instead dramatized the ingredients that enabled this car to become like nothing before it? As a prospective Kia buyer, you’d understand your new car as an apex of an origin story… not just a bit of bombast. Having worked with EV makers, I know that the engineering feats within EV’s are actually quite compelling… and are completely unknown to everyone. This makes the power of these ingredients, and the how behind the car, so potentially compelling.
Failures Become Foundations
Music industry mega-icon Jimmy Iovine’s first big break started as a recording engineer, especially through his work with Bruce Springsteen. More specifically, his work getting the drums to sound right. Jimmy spent six weeks working around the clock to try to get the sound to Bruce’s liking. He repeated the process of one drum hit several hundred times until they found the one that worked best with the song. Initially, this grueling process didn’t make much sense to Iovine. He remembers thinking “It’s a stick hitting a drum. How complicated can that be?” But in retrospect, Jimmy realizes “I learned a lot in those few weeks. And I fell in love with the art of creation.”
As a brand, even if you initially think that your “how” is about as compelling as a stick hitting a drum, you can discover the drama in your “drum” by digging into all of the failures that it took to finally get to the final product of your brand. This process of trial and error, almost certainly not known by your customers, becomes a back story that can get your consumers to fall in love with your process of creation in a way that will clearly differentiate you from your competitors.
To celebrate 75 years of selling cars in the US, VW is going to run a Super Bowl ad entitled “Arrival.” But what if VW embraced the power of one of the most famous ads ever made (that was made by them!) and told the story of the many failures that enabled them over the past 75 years to arrive where they are now… getting car buyers everywhere to fall in love with VW’s process of creation. Just like Jimmy Iovine did.
Experiments Become Invitations
Given that he started out as a producer, it’s a near-certain bet that Fred Again.. is a perfectionist and a control freak. In other words, just about the last person who would invite the world into the studio to give their opinion (even DJs at house parties hate requests). But, as you can see in the IG post above, this week Fred Again.. is posting snippets of tracks in progress to invite feedback on which he should pursue.
On the surface, this might seem like some focus group facsimile and anathema to art. But I’d argue that there is something quite interesting happening here. With these clips, Fred is giving another glimpse into his “how” by taking the experiments that are endemic to the creation of any product and turning these experiments into invitations to connect with the song during the course of its creation. He knows that his audience is going to have a much stronger connection to a song that they heard develop over time than just yet another song they heard only as a finished product.
On the big game this Sunday, Mountain Dew is going to run this ad promoting their Baja Blast flavor. But instead of running this one-note joke, what if they instead used their big moment to invite consumers in rather than just talking at them? Interestingly, the Baja Blast flavor that is being advertised this Sunday actually originated from an approach just like this. Back in 2016, in a program entitled Dewcision (iswydt), Mountain Dew had Baja Blast compete against another flavor (Pitch Black). At the time, both of these flavors were limited-time flavors, and so the promotion was to have fans (ahem) dewcide which of these flavors should be kept permanently. So what if this year’s Super Bowl used the power of how social media and technology has changed in the past ~7 years to turbocharge the invitation idea they began? That could be (ahem) a blast.
Summing Up: How Fred Again.. Can Help The Super Bowl… and All Brands
Before you go off and re-watch the Tiny Desk performance, three quick points to sum up.
- First, in today’s unprecedented competitive environment, brands more than ever need to activate the power of their “how” to break through.
- As evidenced by Fred Again.. (and Jimmy Iovine), the three best ways to activate your how are through ingredients, failures, and invitations.
- None of this lessens the importance of your brand and your company knowing its “why.” Without that, both your employees and your customers will be lost. But without the drama of your how, your purpose will be a north star lost in the competitive clouds.
Enjoy the Big Game Sunday. I hope you enjoyed my what-ifs, and I hope your bet on that marriage proposal pays off.
Up Next…
I’ve got a few potential topics percolating for my next piece. But, lest I ignore my own advice, I’ll offer an invitation of my own. If you’ve got a band or a brand that you think could be good for this series, DM me.
