This year's Super Bowl commercials hit the usual notes: inspiring sports tributes, outlandish celebrity cameos, high-concept movie parodies, and a few dashes of social awareness.
But in a media sphere with fewer and fewer television events that capture a national audience, it's still a winning formula, YouTube VP Tara Walpert Levy told Cheddar.
"I think it is getting harder and harder to find water cooler moments that bring together these kinds of audiences that once existed in traditional television," said Walpert Levy said. "The Super Bowl is one of the few and one of the biggest that still delivers."
To highlight the most popular videos as of game day, YouTube on Monday morning ranked the most-viewed Super Bowl LIV spots on the video service.
Amazon topped the list with its ad starring Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi as they imagined what the world was like before Alexa came along to answer everyone's questions.
Facebook, Jeep, Hyundai, and T-Mobile also fell into the top five with a mix of star-studded spots that tended toward absurd humor rather than the flashy or self-serious.
"Comedy definitely won the day here yesterday," Walpert Levy said.
She added that lighter fare does better in the short term, in part due to the festive mood that comes with Super Bowl viewing parties, but "if you look at the trend over a broader stretch, you see a more mixed story, because of some of those more touching ads really pop."
The life of Super Bowl ads before and after game day is increasingly a factor in which spots get remembered and talked about.
No less than 43 brands pre-released their ads online before game day. That's up from 30 brands the year prior, according to Ad Age.
Companies understandably want to get their money's worth. A 30-second spot costs $5.6 million. The price hit $5 million in 2017 and jumped to $5.2 million in 2018.
While airtime during one of America's last big TV events doesn't come cheap, access to such a large audience might still be worth the price tag.
"If you're looking for a water cooler moment and to get people talking and you've got a great ad, this is the place to be," Levy said.
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