Ask a Super Bowl advertiser: Chris Brody of M&M’S

You could say that Chris Brody ’10 MBA has a pretty sweet gig. As the global content architect for M&M’S, Brody has led the colorful and iconic candy brand’s last three Super Bowl advertising campaigns. 

“It’s exhilarating,” says Brody. “It takes close collaboration and a shared goal, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I want to be on the brand and the project that everyone’s eyes are on with those high stakes.”

It’s a career path his Kellogg MBA experience prepared him especially well for. Each year, renowned marketing professors Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker host the Super Bowl Ad Review. Now in its 20th year, the highly anticipated event gathers marketing students to review and evaluate the big game’s biggest ads in real time.

We caught up with Brody in the weeks leading up to this year’s Super Bowl LVIII to learn about what it’s like quarterbacking M&M’S biggest ad moment of the year. 

As we speak, you’re in the middle of working on your third Super Bowl campaign for M&M’S. What was the first campaign you worked on for the brand?

My first one was the 2021 Super Bowl ad featuring actor Dan Levy, the star of television show Schitt’s Creek. Our advertising program that year had its center of gravity around the TV spot, and we designed and built our subsequent marketing as a result.  We achieved our goal, which was to be a top-10 spot in the Kellogg Ad Review along with other ad reviews. We were proud to get an A in the Kellogg ranking and No. 4 in the USA Today ad meter. That was an awesome moment, and it was so exciting. 

The next year, M&M’S took a really different approach, which involved the spokescandies being put on “indefinite pause” and being replaced by actress Maya Rudolph before they made a triumphant return. What was it like taking that big risk? 

We really broke the mold for Mars Super Bowl programs. Instead of focusing on the TV spot, we designed a whole marketing narrative for the three weeks leading up to the Super Bowl with a series of developments tied to the M&M’S brand. We had a lot of fun with those storylines, and we brought the spokescandy characters all back together for a climactic moment in the Super Bowl. The 30-second ad during the game played a key role, but it really was just a chapter within that larger story.  

That second ad didn’t fare very well in the Kellogg Ad Review, but the overall program did its job. We blew away our earned reach goals, achieving 25 billion in earned impressions, which was many times more than the previous record for us. We were the most talked-about brand in the Super Bowl that year. We ended up winning several awards, including a couple of Cannes Lions. And best of all, that Super Bowl program drove the highest Q1 sales in our brand’s 82-year history. Still, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt a little bit that we didn’t score as well in the Kellogg Ad Review for the individual spot! 

The Super Bowl Ad Review is a highlight of the year for marketing students, and you participated twice when you were a student. What are some lessons from that experience have stuck with you throughout your career? 

I loved experiencing the very analytical assessment of the spots with my fellow students, as we were all right in the middle of our marketing studies. I learned that as consumers, we all have our gut reactions, and we can say if we like an ad, but there are many other factors to consider. Going through the Super Bowl Ad Review showed me that there are many different dynamics at play in determining whether an ad works and that it's possible to take an objective assessment to that. 

The Super Bowl Ad Review uses a specific framework, the ADPLAN framework, co-developed by professor Derek Rucker. How did that framework change the way you think about marketing? Do you still apply it to your work today? 

It helped to foster in me a thoughtful and strategic approach to reviewing the quality of an ad, beyond the entertainment value or how it spoke to me personally. I’ve taken the essence of that and I’ve built that into not only the way I review creative, but in the way my team and I put together creative briefs. So many companies have a particular framework or way of assessing things, but going in with those foundational principles from my Kellogg experience helped to build those analytical muscles. 

This year, the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review is celebrating its 20th anniversary. What’s one prediction you have for the next 20 years of marketing? 

We’re already in such an evolution. The last 10 years — even the last three years since I’ve been in my current role — there has been so much change, but that’s part of the fun of being in this industry. You never have it all figured out, and you’re always learning and adjusting. 

One thing we’re seeing is that there’s been a major migration from mass advertising to more personalized advertising. That is actually informing the Super Bowl program for us — obviously the 30-second spot during the game still reaches 100 million people, so on the one hand, we need to make sure we have universally appealing content. But I think the Super Bowl is probably the last bastion of TV-forward brand content, and so at the same time, you need to surround the ad with all the other touchpoints you have within the brand’s ecosystem. We have the opportunity to make it so much more personalized and to really speak to people and make it meaningful to them in a custom way. 

Any teasers you can share about the M&M’S commercial in this upcoming Super Bowl? 

I'm not going to give away too much. But there might be a little bit of both of our past approaches at work. We’re hoping that we will have success with the overall program and build an exciting narrative that people can engage in for multiple weeks, but we will also have a standalone spot that’s going to that’s going to perform well on its own merit. I'm excited for everybody to see it! 

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