How to Make Advertising the “Super Bowl Every Day” with Gavin Lester, on Ad Age

As we all gathered around our screens on Super Bowl Sunday (and some lucky few around the field), Zambezi Chief Creative Officer, Gavin Lester, had an inspired thought—what if advertising could always match the caliber of Super Bowl ads? The ads this year, better received when they featured humor, heart, and surprising celebrity cameos, made him wonder,  what if commercials were just as exciting and anticipated every day of the year as they are on game day? What’s standing in their way?

According to Gavin, mutual trust between a brand and its agency is the deciding factor. Brands trust agencies to take creative even further, and agencies are accustomed to thinking of their wildest ideas, on one day a year. Here’s how he recommends applying the same collaborative system to every day:

  1. Don’t “budget” your creative thinking. It may feel like the best ideas need deep pockets (don’t we all wish!), but a giant media spend doesn’t substitute intense creative thinking to match Super Bowl-level creativity and quality. Say your best ideas as if budget were no object. If brands have to reduce the scope or remove the clutch cameo, they can make those calls later. The seed of the Big Idea would remain.

  2. Create for 127 million people…even when there aren’t. Clients should let creatives run wild with big ideas when 127 million people aren’t watching. A smaller audience isn’t less deserving of creatively interesting work. For creatives, know what you’re airing/streaming/posting against in 2025. For the big game, every brand targets every viewer, rather than specific audiences at specific times. Keep doing that! Not only do you reach your consumers, but you open your marketing to everyone else for attention-grabbing discussion.

  3. Put reactions and conversations over product benefits. Super Bowl metrics are fun; the views are up, sure, but clients care more about how “talked about” (or laughed about or cried about) their spots are. But then the rest of the year, we soften creative without the Super Bowl as a motivator. Clients and agencies both need to stop thinking about marketing as advertising and start thinking about marketing as entertainment that resonates in culture—as ideas worth talking about based on their creative merit.

Inspired for more? Read Gavin’s full thoughts on Ad Age HERE.