With a game that was competitive until the final 20 seconds of play, last night’s Super Bowl kept football fans on the edge of their seats. But MBA students at Kellogg’s School of Management were focused on competition of another sort: the battle for best Super Bowl ad. With almost 70 Kellogg MBA students reviewing all of the spots, McDonald’s emerged the victor, the school reports.
McDonald’s spot, “Lovin’ Pays,” announced a new promotion the fast food chain will feature from now through Valentine’s Day, in which select customers will be invited to pay for their order not with money but with “lovin,’” including happy dances, calls to tell their mom they love her, etc. McDonald’s Super Bowl strategy also extended to Twitter, where the company gave away prizes to people who re-tweeted flattering messages it tweeted about fellow Super Bowl advertisers.
Kellogg’s MBA students put McDonald’s at the top of the 2015 Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review, giving the fast-food company an “A” grade for its performance. Other advertisers receiving a top grade from Kellogg included Always, with its “Like a Girl” campaign, Budweiser and Bud Light, Clash of Clans, Coke and Fiat.
The vast majority of advertisers received B’s or C’s from the Kellogg review team, including Nationwide, which caught flak from some for its tearjerker ad about childhood deaths resulting from preventable accidents, and Esurance, which cast Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston in its “Sorta Pharmacy” spot.
Squarespace, which featured a somewhat bewildering spot featuring Jeff Bridges, scored the only F of the night, according to the Kellogg review team.
Kellogg Marketing Professor Tim Calkins live tweeted throughout the game about each of the spots in real time and published the Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review results on his website this morning. He will post a full analysis later today.
