What Makes an Ad Go Viral? Creative Content, Celebrity Endorsement, and YouTube Engagement in Two Decades of Super Bowl Advertising (2000–2020)
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This study examines which creative content strategies are most strongly associated with digital audience engagement in Super Bowl television advertising. Drawing on a dataset of 233 commercials aired between 2000 and 2020 by the ten most frequent Super Bowl advertisers, this paper analyzes the relationship between seven binary creative-content attributes; humor, early product reveal, patriotic themes, celebrity endorsement, danger, animal imagery, and sexual appeal and post-broadcast YouTube engagement, measured through view, like, and dislike counts. Engagement metrics were found to be highly intercorrelated, and ads combining three to four creative themes generated the strongest audience response, with humor and early product reveal remaining the dominant strategies across the two-decade period. Celebrity endorsement, while increasingly common after 2015, was not associated with a statistically significant increase in views, though it was associated with a lower dislike ratio in more recent years. These findings suggest that creative complexity and thematic combination, rather than any single tactic in isolation, are the stronger drivers of digital engagement with televised advertising. The study concludes with implications for advertising strategy, notes the limitations of secondary YouTube metrics, and proposes directions for future longitudinal and causal research.
Keywords
Advertising Effectiveness, Audience Response, Celebrity Endorsement, Creative Content, Digital Marketing, Super Bowl Advertising, Viral Advertising, Youtube Engagement