I get together with the same friends nearly every year to watch the Super Bowl. Beyond the game, I am always interested in their reaction to the commercials. I observe their responses. Did the commercial make them feel some sort of emotion? Did they laugh or groan? Best of all, I want to know if they remembered the brand associated with the advertising. I do an unscientific poll of my friends each year to see what they remember about the most expensive commercial spots of the year.

Near the end of the game, I always ask which commercials they would rank as the best. Here are their responses:

- The Budweiser Clydesdales and the Lost Puppy

- The Brady Bunch Snickers commercial

- The Invisible Mindy Kaling and Matt Damon commercial - got the loudest laughs of the night

- The Pete Rose Hall of Fame commercial

- The Fiat on Viagra was also a laugher, probably the second loudest laughs of the night

- The Doritos Open Plane Seat (taken by a mother with a baby)

Now I want you to take a look at the response. Remember I asked people to tell me their favorite commercials near the end of the game. What do these commercials all have in common? First, they were remembered by the group. When someone would say, "I liked the ________ commercial,” no one asked them to describe it for them. They all knew which commercial was being talked about. There are only six commercials on this list. There were 61 commercials during the Super Bowl. Less than 10 percent resonated with the people at the party I attended and were remembered, which is extremely important. There were plenty of commercials that made people laugh or feel some other emotion, but they were not remembered. Why? Because there were 61 big budget commercials all vying for our attention. Your brain will not be able to recall all of them. So learn lesson #1 from these six commercials. If your advertising is not memorable, you are wasting good marketing dollars for diminishing returns.

The second thing I want to you to see is the way these ads were described by the group. Two on the list were remembered by the actors in the commercials, not by their brands. If you were paying $4.5 million for a thirty second spot, wouldn’t you want your brand remembered at the end of the night? Both the Mindy Kaling and Matt Damon commercial and the Pete Rose commercial were funny and memorable, but the brand was lost. Do you remember which brands were being promoted on those two spots? The Mindy/Matt commercial was for Nationwide Auto Insurance and the Pete Rose ad was for Skechers shoes. In the Pete Rose ad, the shoes were seen and talked about, but the gag line of Pete being kicked out of the hall, even at home, overpowered the brand in the collective minds of my friends. In the Mindy/Matt ad, the brand was not mentioned or eluded to until the very last few seconds. At my party, people were laughing too hard at the punch line to hear it. Sometimes star power can overpower a brand. On the other side of that coin, the Snickers commercial combined a classic Brady Bunch sitcom with Danny Trejo and Steve Buscemi as sisters Marsha and Jan Brady. This would have also bombed out on the brand memory chart if the Snickers bar had not played a central role in changing Danny back to actress Maureen McCormick – the original Marsha Brady. Plus, Snickers has had a very strong tagline that dates back to the Betty White Super Bowl commercial of 2010 (yes, five years ago.) "You’re not you when you’re hungry” is all that needs to be said and we remember the brand.

That leads me to the Budweiser commercial where the puppy is lost. Anheuser Busch actually placed three ads in the Super Bowl – all very different from the others (Human Pac Man and a subdued, How We Craft the Beer, are the other two commercials.) The lost puppy ad was rated one of the best this year and it all has to do with telling a story that pulls at your emotions and making a very strong brand image central to that storyline. The brilliance of using a specific horse to represent your product is very powerful. You cannot see an image or hear the name "Clydesdale” without thinking of Budweiser. Without even showing the product, we think of the specific brand every time we see one of those horses. So they can get away with a heart-touching story of a lost dog and the Clydesdales coming to its rescue and we all associate it with the correct brand. Budweiser typically comes in as one of the strongest commercials during the Super Bowl year after year. Their commercials with the Clydesdales rank higher than their other commercials. It is all about the brand.

One more thing I want to point out has to do with timing. I went back and checked this. All of the commercials my friends thought were the best were broadcast in the first half of the game, except for one, which was during halftime. In fact, 4 of the 6 commercials that made our list were broadcast in the second quarter of the game. Here is what I think happened. As I observed my friends, there was great anticipation of the early commercials in the game, and they were disappointing. I heard a lot of, "that was stupid,” or "I don’t get it,” comments. (The online gaming commercials in particular were over the head of the demographic at my party.) Some of the commercials tried to make too much of a social statement for the mood of the people at my party. It’s not that they didn’t believe in the cause, they weren’t ready to think about it in the middle of a football game. The Proctor and Gamble "Like a Girl” commercial, the Nationwide "Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” and even the NFL’s Domestic Abuse spot seemed out of place in the midst of a festive event. So there was an expectation that was not met in the first quarter. The first commercial of the second quarter was the Budweiser Lost Puppy. It got everyone watching the commercials again. After halftime, the commercials, I believe, were overshadowed by the first half commercials. Overall, I thought this was a mediocre year for creativity in Super Bowl commercials. For the most part, it had all been done before. When people are already ignoring it all before your ad makes an appearance, you will be tuned out. I think that’s what happened during the third and fourth quarters. That being said, timing and placement of advertising is key to your success. If you are associated with your mediocre competition, people will ignore you regardless of how creative your ad is.