Hellman’s Super Bowl Ad is a Social Hit

Make creative your competitive edge; unlock insights and inspiration from 100,000+ ads, rooted in emotional response, to predict and improve your creative’s business impact. Access every Ad Of The Week in our Topical Ads categories.

Hellmann’s surreal “Meal Diamond” ad rocked the Super Bowl, landing an enviable 4.1-Star on our predictive Test Your Ad platform and winding up inside the game night Top 10 on an evening where the overall quality of Super Bowl ads dipped.

The ad from agency VML starred Andy Samberg as sandwich based singer “Meal Diamond” who serenades a surprised diner with the mayo-inspired “Sweet Sandwich Time”. It’s a 30-second slice of strangeness that was one of the weirdest and funniest ads of the night, continuing Hellmann’s strong performance in their sixth consecutive Super Bowl year.

But how would the TV ad translate to social media? As well as our standard Test Your Ad report we put one of Hellmann’s “Sweet Sandwich Time” social executions through the Test Your Ad Social platform to find out how well it performs with an audience of social media users.

This version of the ad is a brief 15 seconds, formatted for vertical viewing and zooming in on the dynamic movement and sandwich-making in the ad, with slices of bread and squirts of mayo flying around. It gets straight to the “Sweet Sandwich Time” earworm, a version of Neil Diamond’s classic “Sweet Caroline”. What the edit loses in narrative clarity it gains in energy and directness.

From our Test Your Ad Social database we know that it’s a lot harder to make a strong social media ad than an effective TV one. The average Star Rating for Social ads – a predictive measure of long-term brand building potential – is only 1.7-Stars on a 5-Star scale. Only 10% of ads get 3-Stars or more. Because the format is so compressed and fast-moving it’s simply tougher for brands to make the positive emotional impact needed for high long-term effectiveness.

Hellmann’s ad bucks this trend. A very good 3.9-Star Rating among social media users puts it in the top 5% of ads we’ve seen on Test Your Ad Social. With Test Your Ad Social you can see what’s driving the emotional response with analysis of types of happiness (Amused, Excited and Uplifted come out on top) and check the associations people are making with the ad to make sure the brand and product are recognisable. You can also explore the exact brand assets people are recognising in the ad. In Hellmann’s case, they’re strongly visual, with the logo, shape and color coming up tops.

It’s not easy to take a mass-audience Super Bowl ad and tailor it well to the attention-poor, micro-audience of viewers on Social Media. By paring down its ad to the central joke, and making the visuals strongly focused on brand and product, Hellmann’s has carried its Super Bowl success over to a whole different game.