GS&P's Margaret Johnson Shares Her Secrets on Developing a Winning Super Bowl Ad

Goodby Silverstein & Partners has four clients in Super Bowl 58—Kawasaki, Doritos, Mountain Dew and BMW. And it’s not even the first time the San Francisco-based agency has pulled such heavy duty. The buck stops with chief creative officer Margaret Johnson, a 28-year veteran of the agency who has worked on Big Game ads for Bubly, E*Trade, Budweiser and Cheetos, to name a few. “Making a Super Bowl ad is certainly a career highlight,” she said. Given how expensive and huge the production can be, it's also an intimidating one. At GS&P, there’s a small core team for each ad, who check in daily with the client. “You want to keep the team pretty tight so that people feel responsible,” she explained. “If you’re part of a big team throwing out ideas, you feel less pressure to own it and make it great.” Lead times vary: With clients like Frito-Lay or Pepsi, the planning often starts in the summer, while other advertisers wait until after the holidays to make their move—whether it’s to see if competitors are running ads or simply because there’s space in the budget at the end of the year. Advertisers sometimes miss the biggest differentiator between Super Bowl commercials and any other ad slot: “It’s the biggest stage in advertising, where you’re appealing to everyone from little kids to great-grandparents,” Johnson said. The trick is finding different ways to reach these widely varied audiences within the same creative. There are two sure bets: Make it funny, and keep it simple. Many people are watching the Super Bowl at loud parties, so anything dialogue-driven likely won’t get its point across. As for the process, “it's definitely chaotic. Creating a Super Bowl spot is a messy, messy experience because the road takes a lot of twists and turns.” One roadblock: Going into a client presentation featuring a certain celebrity or music track, but being unable to secure them for the ad. “The name of the game is being flexible.” Get it all right, and you might find yourself making a cultural moment rather than trying to catch up. “There's nothing more rewarding than being in an Uber and the driver says, ‘I was watching the Super Bowl, and this ad is my favorite.’ And if it's yours, there's no feeling like it.” Kawasaki Lets Its Mullet Fly in the Brand’s First Super Bowl Ad It’s not just a commercial “Make sure you are creating a 360 campaign,” Johnson noted. Tease your creative before the game, nail the ad, then have “a killer second screen experience that lets the consumer be a part of that campaign.” In the 2020 Super Bowl, GS&P got Lil Nas X and Sam Elliott to have a Wild West-themed dance-off for Doritos that continued on TikTok as the #CoolRanchDance challenge. Cross-generational, second screen-friendly, funny—check. Take risks When Budweiser bowed out of the Big Game in 2021 for the first time in 37 years, Goodby saw an opportunity for Sam Adams. In the ad, a recognizable team of Clydesdales was set loose to wreak havoc by “Your Cousin From Boston,” who got a little carried away by his excitement for the brand’s new Wicked Hazy brew. The spot was a regional buy but appeared on many Best Ads lists for the Big Game. “They got 20 times the earned media than the $700,000 media spend,” Johnson said. “So playing into culture and tropes at the Super Bowl can be really effective, especially for the underdogs.” Bio Margaret Johnson is chief creative officer at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. She has created media-transcending work for Doritos, Cheetos, Pepsi, HP and BMW, as well as social justice campaigns like "Not a Gun," encouraging unconscious bias training for police, and "Lessons in Herstory," an app that reinserts women into history. Johnson has created some of the most memorable Super Bowl campaigns of the last five years, including “Jack’s New Angle” for Doritos (2023); “Push It Flamin' Hot” (2022); “It Wasn’t Me” and “Can’t Touch This” for Cheetos; Bubly’s “It’s Bubly!” and Pepsi's “More Than OK” (2019); and Doritos Blaze vs. Mountain Dew Ice (2018).