Rocket Mortgage triumphed over mediocrity to top USA Today’s Ad Meter ranking of the best Super Bowl commercials.

The ad, in which actor Anna Kendrick fights to buy Barbie’s Dream House in a cut-throat property market, scored just 6.82 on the Ad Meter – every other winner in the past five years has scored higher than seven.

Kantar’s assessment of this year’s crop of big-game ads was equally stingy. It ran pre-released Super Bowl ads through its Link AI tool, which predicts creative effectiveness, and rated 66% of them as merely average.

If there was a dominant theme among this year’s crop, it was nostalgia. Chevrolet used actors from The Sopranos (which ended in 2007) to promote its all-electric Silverado model, GM revived characters from the Austin Powers franchise (which ended in 2002), and Verizon hired Jim Carrey to resurrect his role from The Cable Guy (1996) to promote its 5G internet.

One way to read this trend is that brands are picking ambassadors from before the internet fragmented media and diluted the cultural impact of movies and shows. Another is that marketers were simply appealing to the Super Bowl’s older audience (the number of 18- to 49-year-olds watching fell almost 35% between 2011 and 2021). The decision to pack the game’s half-time show with performers who were popular in the late 90s and early 00s lends weight to the latter theory.

Not that crypto brands were put off by the older audience – they’re the ones with the cash, after all – and the most talked-about ad of the day belonged to Coinbase, which broadcast a QR code slowly bouncing around a black screen for 60 seconds.

The glitchy and inscrutable style of the Coinbase ad was similar to Reddit’s 2021 Superb Owl spot. And while some derided Coinbase's ad, there was no denying it had an impact, sending more than 20 million visitors to its website in the space of a minute and forcing the company to throttle traffic.

There are probably lots of clever things to say here about digital aesthetics annexing analogue formats, but that might be overthinking it. Coinbase’s ad was a misfit among the field of polished ads fronted by megastar celebrities, and so it stood out.

Coinbase and the agency behind its campaign (Accenture Interactive) may both be relative newcomers to advertising, but it appears they got the memo: when everyone else zigs, zag.

Campaign of the Week /

Waitrographer

The Hilton is training its waiting staff to take better smartphone photos for guests.

The Waitographer programme was begun in the United Arab Emirates, where participants received instruction from professional photographer Roger Moukarzel. Hilton staff who completed the training will wear a badge to identify them to guests looking for someone to take their picture.

The scheme is a novel and modern way for Hilton to communicate its commitment to good service and attention to detail, and justify its luxury price tag. Read our full analysis, here. Contagious.

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The strategy behind Wendy’s Discord campaign

Wendy’s has conquered Twitter like no other brand, but in 2021 it showed it was no one-platform wonder by replicating some of its success on Discord.

In August 2021, Wendy’s announced that it had partnered with communications app Discord to create its own server and was inviting people to join and chat about burgers and gaming. Within a week it was the platform’s biggest branded server, with 50,000 members.

We spoke to Kirstin Tormey, Wendy’s social media manager, to find out more about the insight and strategy behind the campaign. Read our interview here. Contagious.

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Spotlight on Latin America

In our round up of the best campaigns from Latin America over the past month, Netflix hands the premiere of its documentary on football star Neymar to a Twitch streamer, and Telco WOM lets comedians roast its marketing manager in a YouTube show.

Read it here. Contagious.

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Levi's brand president on why she quit

Levi’s brand president, Jennifer Sey, has written frankly about resigning her position after refusing to apologise for protesting school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Monday Sey published an article on former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss’ Substack detailing how she was pressured to stop speaking publicly about the issue and then asked to do an ‘apology tour’ and claim that she was ‘an imperfect ally’.

Wherever you stand on closing schools, Sey’s account is a revealing one, and it's compelling because it’s so rare to read anything other than carefully stage-managed statements about top-level exits. And Sey's claim that she declined a $1m severance package so that she could talk openly about her situation explains why. Substack.

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BMW's wild ride

Luxury codes have been becoming less stuffy and more playful for over a decade, but even we were taken aback at how far BMW pushed the trend with its Chinese New Year ad.

The 90-second spot, created by TBWA\Bolt, has an early-internet aesthetic, with lots of collage-style imagery and quick cuts, but if we had to guess a single influence, we’d say it's this. Either way, the ad is very weird and a lot of fun. YouTube.