My all-time favorite matched the rest of the country, according to the USA Today Ad Meter – Kia’s Hero’s Journey featuring Melissa McCarthy as an eco-warrior. It worked because Melissa McCarthy is funny, and she was doing the most outrageous activities to save some part of the natural world. That’s a recipe for fun. As a marketing professor, I appreciated how Kia brought that humor back to the brand’s benefit – from eco-warrior to an eco-hybrid. You don’t have to be a hero to help the earth, just drive a car that does that. Well done!

Audi shows that it has the pulse of this nation with its “Daughter” ad. How does a man, or anyone, explain to a young girl today that her work effort is worth less than a man’s? The gender pay disparity simply has no reasonable explanation.

Budweiser’s “Born the Hard Way” also has a compelling message, showing how proud immigrants have been to come to the United States and make a contribution. No matter whether you like craft beer, Anheuser-Busch still has the best selling beer brands in the US. And what I found interesting about this message is that Anheuser-Busch has actually returned to its roots since InBev, a Dutch company, bought it several years ago. So, the real story is from immigrants to an American giant and now back to a foreign nation.

I cannot overlook one ad that had everyone near me laughing out loud – Bai’s "Jentleman." Who doesn’t love the way Christopher Walken delivers a line, and the background with NSync’s Bye-Bye-Bye was intended to make the brand memorable. This ad would have worked better for me if they had tied anything into brand knowledge – what does Bai do for people who drink it? Instead, it was all about brand awareness. I bet that some people will try it the next time they see it. But it would have been nice to know more about why they should.

With 100 million plus viewers, the Super Bowl is a great way to build brand equity and consumer awareness is the first step. Utilizing the “Bye Bye Bye” humor with Justin Timberlake and Christopher Walken—two very funny, likeable entertainers utilized to great effect—was a great way to plant that “ear worm” in consumers’ minds. There were lots of humor-driven ads, but I thought this one had humor that was perfectly executed to support but not overwhelm the brand’s message.

This lived up to the high expectations of probably the greatest Super Bowl advertiser of all time. It was a modern classic of advertising, and it was timely without courting quite the same level of backlash as some other brands. It had great early release results as well. No Clydesdales (wait—I take that back, they snuck them in!), no dogs, etc. and this was not the safest route—great ad.

Lesson: if you have great content, don’t be afraid to run it again here even if it’s not “new,” similar to the Always “Like a Girl” ad did a couple of years ago. This was first run at the Super Bowl back in 2014, but they used it again and it worked.

The Hyundai 90-second tribute to the military was a wonderful use of technology and tie-in to the game itself with the soldiers’ families there.