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On Super Bowl Sunday, playing it safe is a guaranteed fumble.

At least when it comes to the commercials.

Courtesy Coca-Cola

“If you show up at the Super Bowl and your ad is just OK and nobody talks about you, you've wasted millions of dollars,” said Jeff Gillette, an assistant teaching professor of advertising at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information. “If people are divided about whether they love you or hate you and they're talking about you, that's a big win.”

Gillette, a former creative director with 20 years in the advertising business, knows how nerve-wracking it can be to view the commercials and hope for the best as public reaction unfolds. He helped create Coca-Cola spots for six Super Bowls at renowned ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. ��

Coke’s 2014 Super Bowl ad was particularly memorable for Gillette. The 60-second spot featured young American women signing “America the Beautiful” in a blend of English and their native tongues—including Hebrew, Spanish and a Native American dialect—to celebrate the nation’s diversity.

The scrutiny started immediately, with the ad content debated for days on Facebook feeds and morning news shows.

“We told the Coca-Cola marketing team beforehand, ‘You are going to get backlash, and we need you to back it up,’” Gillette said. And in doing so, they were rewarded: “After it aired, they saw a dip in consumer sentiment for maybe a minute, but then it spiked afterward. There were significantly more people who defended that spot than tried to tear it down.”

Jeff Gillette

Gillette is now co-director of the strategic communication design master’s program, popularly known as The Brand Studios. As he tells his students, airing Super Bowl commercials isn’t for every client. To ensure that today’s going rate of $8 million for 30 seconds of airtime is money well-spent, companies need to have broad appeal to the 125 million people watching.

“If you're in a space that has a lot of competition—like beer, soda, cars—it’s a great opportunity,” he said. “The purpose of Super Bowl marketing is for an established company to persuade you with brand affection and brand emotion. It works when it’s either funny or pulls on your emotional heart strings. It needs to be big and bold, and not trying to sell you something. It’s about communicating on an emotional level.”

Gillette has also seen plenty of flops in his day, too. One that sticks out for him was Mountain Dew’s “Puppy Monkey Baby” campaign during the Denver Broncos’ win in 2016. The spot features a diaper-clad, pug-faced, dancing monkey handing out beverages to three young men on a couch.

“Somebody brainstormed that puppies, monkeys and babies all do well for the Super Bowl. So, what if we mixed them all together?” Gillette said. “You want to be out there and memorable. But you can't just be weird without any kind of a message. Even though some people liked the ad, it didn’t connect with me emotionally.”

Others, though, did make the connection—some critics called it that year’s best ad while others labeled it the worst, creating the divisive buzz Gillette said can lead to consumer attention.

While some companies’ ad concepts only get one Super Bowl in the spotlight, others continue to feature their stable of mainstays. Budweiser has their Clydesdales. Doritos loves user-generated content. And Coca-Cola’s polar bears—icons that began with 1920s French print ads—made a comeback during the 2012 Super Bowl.

Gillette and fellow creative director Hal Curtis dreamed up a fresh angle for those fluffy carnivores beyond the standard in-game advertisement. Would the audience watch a livestream of the bears watching the game?

The creative team used Xbox controllers—this was 2012, after all—to puppet the computer-generated imagery with prepared actions. This enabled the bears—one a Patriots fan, the other a Giants fan—to react with cheers and disgust to the game, halftime show and commercials in real time.

The risk paid off. Nine million people tuned in on phones and laptops for an average of 28 minutes.

“You never get that length of time for somebody to engage with your brand,” Gillette said. “At no time were we like, ‘Hey, go have a Coca-Cola.’ It wasn’t a hard pitch. It was just a brand experience that people seemed to like, because people love the polar bears.”

And apparently, on the eve of this year’s Super Bowl, Pepsi now loves the polar bears, too. More than a week before the big game, Pepsi rolled out a playful twist where a polar bear unexpectedly prefers Pepsi over Coke in a blind taste test of its zero-sugar sodas.

Game on. What’s Coke’s next play?

“If I were Coke, I’d ignore it and concentrate on making better advertising,” Gillette said. “What they shouldn't do is react. If they do, Pepsi gets what they were after: some much-needed attention as the No. 2.

“I don’t blame them, though. Pepsi has always been the challenger brand—and when you’re in that spot, you got to poke, you know, the bear.”

Ryan Huff is the assistant dean of communications and engagement at CMDI.