My name is Fred Cunha, and I go to every Super Bowl but have never seen the game.
For 51 weeks of the year, I serve as vice president of partnerships development at XR Extreme Reach, a role well aligned with my 25-plus years of broadcast and digital media industry leadership. It’s the work I do during the other week that has earned me the title of Super Bowl ad quarterback and MVP for over a decade—without ever stepping foot in the stadium.
You may think the quarterback reference in this op-ed title is an obvious nod to my remarkable resemblance to Tom Brady. Not true. Here’s the deal: While there is a lot of attention on live events and the challenges that marketers and publishers face in making ad experiences seamless, I’ve been in the trenches of making it happen for years. I am proud of the work I do to make creative perfection the standard for every ad regardless of platform or channel. The ads placed for the Super Bowl are the most prominent and expensive of the year; if they do not air without a hitch, millions of dollars, brand reputations, marketers’ jobs, and AOR statuses will all be at stake.
Still, you might think, in the age of AI, does it really take a human in the loop to QA the Super Bowl ads? The answer is yes, but it may not be what you think. There are three primary reasons why Super-Fred, and now Super-Jaime (who joined me last year at CBS for the first time), remain the most sought-after teammates at the networks that air the Super Bowl.
The first is the interplay between humans and technology. On some levels, AI and efficient creative workflows have certainly made analyzing Super Bowl ads much faster, allowing the stakeholders—me, the network, the advertiser, and the agency—to do our careful review work in hours instead of days.
But AI can only go so far. One thing it cannot make up for, and has often been the reason the networks ask me to “eat on premise” and “stock up on Vitamin C,” is the existence of the unsurprisingly nervous sponsor. For every major brand CMO that walks into a Super Bowl ad screening session cool as a cucumber, there are four more that are jittery and questioning every split second of their ads. Prior to those sessions, the technology we use can easily determine if the ads, in fact, meet the specifications and are the ones their teams so meticulously produced for their big moment.
The second reason for our presence is that things sometimes do go wrong the week before the game, and when they do, humans often notice the irregularities faster than machines. For instance, every now and then, while watching superiorly art-directed, highly cinematic masterpieces, it becomes clear that, as clever as the ad is, it’s missing something. Sometimes what it’s missing is as simple as a music track. In those scenarios, there’s really nothing as valuable, conscious, and rapid as experienced people who make a “habit of noticing.” Why? Because once we alert the client, we can work quickly to determine why something is missing and how to fix it, or how to come up with an alternative solution.
Finally, time is of the essence. Since most in-game spots are delivered the week before the Super Bowl, when there is an issue, there is very little time to waste. Once an issue is discovered, I sometimes literally run to the control room to confirm the issue and start the process of addressing it. That can be as simple as an approval from the client to air an advertisement as-is, or as complicated as creating a new file with a new code, re-adding the closed captioning, delivering the new file to the network, and restarting the clearance process with the network and the NFL.
The human touch—with a technology assist—is helping us deliver client value better and faster every day. The creative intelligence we now have at our fingertips tells us everything from how well an ad represents an intended audience to how effective the creative is likely to be. Our years of hands-on experience are crucial as technology helps advance the creative workflow, and as brands and publishers place big bets on linear and livestreaming sports, chasing audiences who demand optimal, seamless, and engaging experiences across every screen.
Perhaps there will come a day when the robots copiloting the work we do reach genius level. For now, you’ll find me in the control room, working with the network and the agency execs to make every ad a touchdown. I’ll be the guy in the “I’m No Tom Brady” T-shirt with a very large cup of coffee.
