The most successful Super Bowl commercial hides narrative techniques that show some of the structural directions that must be considered to generate listening.
February 20, 2024 8:30 p.m.
The Kanye West commercial was one of the most striking moments of the classic batch of Superbowl 2024 commercials. Its sales team confirmed that within 24 hours of the announcement they had nearly 300,000 orders on their website, pocketing a figure close to 19 million of dollars.
What happened in that video? At narraglobal we technically analyze the narrative of the commercial and leave four technical insights that explain why Kanye West and team achieved good communication praxis.
1. Break a pattern
There is scientific evidence that shows that windows of attention are generated by violating a pattern, an expected sequence. The Kanye West commercial is an example of that. The batch of Superbowl commercials abounds in blockbusters. Scorsese filming and acting for a brand, superstars selling electric cars. We see hundreds of thousands of dollars in post-production resources for every second of spot. When in the middle of this narrative trend a vertical video appears, poorly lit and capturing ambient sound: the pattern is broken. With that narrative decision, Kanye West managed to capture attention in the midst of so much commercial noise. First success.
2. Talk regarding money
With few exceptions, money is not talked regarding in commercial narratives. The standard is to seek to build imaginaries, places where you want to make the audience travel to generate a set of emotions associated with the brand or product. What did Kanye West do? In his spot recorded in selfie mode, West begins by talking regarding money: “Since we already spent all the money on the commercial space, we didn’t spend a single cent on the commercial itself.”
Why is that good narrative praxis? Because it doesn’t invite you to a new reality, it doesn’t spend seconds setting up a fictional universe and having you believe it. He spends the first few seconds of his spot talking directly to the audience regarding an investment decision he made. I invested everything in this (buying the space for 7 million dollars) and invested zero dollars in its production.
The interesting thing is that from behavior, West testifies to a purchasing decision. Something that we will see in the next insight, generates a nudge (nudge as behavioral scientists say) that enables the behavior that more than 300,000 people took in 24 hours
3. Spell the order if necessary
West asks them to go to his website: “I want you to go to” and he spells it “YEEZY”. With a pedagogy typical of a primary school teacher or those aeronautical codes that spell complex acronyms with names, such as “VL -WRZ” (Victor- Lima – Whiskey – Romeo – Zulu). Is it good narrative practice? Yes. ‘Because it asks for something specific and makes it accessible, slowing down the information so that this request has a higher rate of effectiveness when carried out.
When spelling, it lowers cognitive friction and emulates letter by letter, very similar to the user experience we have when writing a web address from a cell phone. Letter by letter. Result? Nearly three hundred thousand purchases made in 24 hours. The specific order worked without friction. Pure user experience.
4. Doubt as a human
The closing of the spot has a timeless ingredient for every successful narrative: doubt. Doubt in the narrator humanizes, Jorge Luis Borges mentioned it in his conferences and at the beginning of one of his stories. “In Junín or in Tapalqué he tells this story” and Kanye West does so at the end of his spot “we have shoes and… this is all.” West pauses for four seconds to think if he wants to say anything else. He takes four seconds to hesitate. Approximately close to a million dollars, taking into account the value of the air of the Superbowl round.
He hesitates in front of the camera, in front of millions of people who watch him live and millions of people who watch him on social networks. West burns seconds doubting and thus builds psychological identification. He shows a controlled vulnerability that rounds off a perfect commercial on a narrative level.
If I had to encapsulate all the success parameters of Kanye West’s narrative, I might say that he communicated like one of us. In the Edelman 2024 report, we see that one of the greatest sources of authority and public credibility are “people like me.” People who look like me. They record vertical videos, without sound or professional lighting. On top of a car, with the camera jumping. A video of a few seconds to announce the website of a business. And with the sloppiness of an amateur who towards the end doubts whether he said everything he had to say.
A billionaire communicating like an entrepreneur. And when done technically well, it is credible.
- Lisandro Bregant, He is founder of the narraglobal observatory and host of the “Narratives Club”, an online space for the analysis of narratives.
