Super Bowl advertisements display a US love of celebrity endorsements that we frown upon in the UK

With commercial slots going for $5m per 30 seconds during Super Bowl breaks, advertising is the biggest of business and draws in the stars to match. But in spite of a fleeting fascination with these particular ads, back at home we have little time for flogging from familiar faces

It’s Super Bowl weekend! Which means, for most Brits, watching the first couple of hours of a game that is roughly an equal mix of football, rugby and gladiatorial combat and which seems to last several days.

But never fear, because when the sight of a couple of dozen Smeg fridges in motorbike helmets running into each other like the most complicated game of British Bulldog ever does begin to pall, there’s always the real entertainment to be enjoyed … the adverts.

If the Super Bowl is the circus of the American empire, then the ads sell the bread required to keep the citizenry in check, whether that bread is beer, cars or washing powder. The Super Bowl is the most anticipated ad-break in America. If you think the speculation over the John Lewis Christmas ad over here is something, then imagine that multiplied by a hundred.

Gary Lineker and Cat Deeley channel ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ in 2009 (Rex)

For the past couple of decades, the Super Bowl has been the place to air brand-new trailers for forthcoming movies; this year expect Marvel’s Black Panther, the new Mission: Impossible and the sequel to Pixar smash The Incredibles.

But for good old conspicuous consumption, companies which have been snapping up that $5m (£3.5m) per 30 second (yep, you read that right) advertising airtime include beer brands Michelob, Stella Artois and Budweiser, along with Lexus, Pringles and Tide.

One of the fascinations for British viewers of the ads isn’t just the frankly obscene amounts of money poured into getting us to buy a tube of crisps, but the fact that they often feature actual, well-known celebrities … and nobody’s laughing at them for doing it.

Danny DeVito will appear in an M&M’s ad – and likely won’t have his credibility questioned

This year we’re expected to see Danny DeVito in the M&Ms ad, Morgan Freeman and Peter Dinklage in a joint Doritos/Mountain Dew spot and Keanu Reeves appearing for website design company Squarespace among the roughly million-or-so ads scheduled to appear between the Patriots and Eagles running full-tilt at each other.

Osmond vs Osbourne: Donny and Marie appeared with Ozzy for Pepsi in 2003 (Getty)

Over here we have a difficult relationship with celebrities doing TV adverts. Largely, we don’t seem to like it, unless the celebrity in question is being so self-deprecating that we can all laugh together, or the ad and the performance is so bad that it passes into television legend.

But celebs playing it straight to sell us stuff? No thanks, matey, off you pop. We’re quite happy to have a made-up person like Barry Scott literally shouting at us to buy Cillit Bang so that we can turn all our grubby old spare change into shiny like-new coins (I think that’s what it does) but if you put someone famous, like maybe an actor or TV presenter, in that slot, then we don’t want to know. We are fully aware that proper celebrities don’t spend their time doing the laundry or scrubbing the kitchen floor – they have people to do that sort of thing for them – so why would we rush out and buy some bleach on the basis that a 30-second ad has shown some Nineties pop star squirting some under his toilet rim?

Keanu Reeves’s Super Bowl commercial involves a ‘death-defying’ stunt

There are actually rules on getting celebrities to endorse your brand in the UK. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has several pages of regulations, including the key one of not expecting us to believe a famous person uses your product if they actually don’t. In 2003 the ASA upheld a complaint against claims made on the Go Groopie website that some apple-based skin serum was “a favourite with celebrities such as Helen Mirren and Jennifer Lopez”. Investigation by the ASA found that the evidence for this – a couple of features in the Daily Mail – actually said that the two stars in question had indeed used treatments of that type, but not necessarily that specific brand.

There’s also the question of companies acting responsibly. In the same year, the ASA upheld a complaint about an ad that ought to have won an award for its chutzpah if nothing else. The company in question was Cash Lady, a payday loans company, which put out two TV ads featuring former Atomic Kitten (and veteran of the advertising scene, especially frozen-food purveyor Iceland), Kerry Katona. The only problem was, Katona – seen with a laptop pointing to the Cash Lady site and the promise of a £300 loan at an eye-watering APR – had a couple of years earlier been made bankrupt. The tag-line was “Fast cash for fast lives”. The ASA judgement said: “We considered that because, for many consumers, Kerry Katona was synonymous with debt, viewers who empathised with her personal circumstances could be influenced by her endorsement and make a decision about resolving their own financial shortfalls by obtaining a payday loan product that may not be suitable for them and therefore, potentially harmful.”

Aside from dubious claims and unsuitable endorsements, the fact is that by and large we just don’t buy celebrity endorsements, unless they hit exactly the right note. Take Gary Lineker and his long-running contract to promote Walkers Crisps. He’s one of the few celebs we suffer to flog us stuff, and that’s mainly to do with his ability to poke fun at himself in the ads, distracting us from even questioning the fact a former world-class athlete is stuffing himself full of calorific, high-fat snacks.

In Britain, it seems the main qualifier for an acceptable celebrity ad is a bit of self-deprecation (PA) (PA Archive/PA Images)

Go to Lineker’s Twitter feed at any given time and you’ll find abuse levelled at him for the Walkers ads, but it’s usually a by-product of attacks on him which are really for his former footballing career, his TV punditry, or his often liberal views. Even when a Walkers social media campaign classically backfired, Lineker was stoic. The company had invited people to upload selfies to their website which automatically tweeted them out as if Lineker was holding a big photo of them. Unfortunately, some wags uploaded pictures of serial killers such as Fred West and Dr Harold Shipman.

“Had an unusual day in some very strange company. I’m sure we’ll wave goodbye to them all by tomorrow,” Lineker tweeted ruefully – and engagingly – when the stunt backfired last May.

Do we believe Gary Lineker sits around all day scoffing prawn cocktail crisps? Well, he’s not a professional footballer any more, so presumably there’s nothing to stop him. Do we believe that former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger spends her time eating Muller Light yoghurt? Well, I suppose we must, as that’s what the ads show us. But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I accept that every time she eats one she ends up falling off her chair with a curiously sexual splash of yoghurt on her pert nose, or that these really aren’t the worst ever kinds of celebrity ads. The farce is forced, the comedy is choreographed, there’s simply not enough of a post-modern wink and nudge to make them anything but bum-clenchingly annoying.

David Beckham advertising the Motorola Motorazr in Japan in 2006 (Rex)

Speaking of bum-clenchingly annoying, that can actually work, but only if everyone’s in on the joke, like Michael Winner’s Esure car insurance ads. So infuriating that they passed into popular culture, purely because they were crap and they knew they were. They variously featured Winner, who died in 2013, bumbling into some minor prang generally involving a woman driver, just so he could wind down his window and belittlingly issue a verbal pat on the head with the immortal phrase: “Calm down, dear, it’s only a commercial,” a line which was infamously parroted by then Prime Minister David Cameron to a female MP in 2011.

One of the most successful celeb ad campaigns has been mobile phone operator EE’s partnership with the actor Kevin Bacon. It’s difficult to put your finger on just what makes them not terrible … perhaps it’s the almost post-modern, meta aspect of them, similar in a way to Winner breaking the illusion of his ads by declaring it’s a commercial, that sees Bacon ramping up his celebrity status yet being a personal friend of everyone he meets on his overly enthusiastic data-fuelled journey around the UK.

It might also be that he’s American, and thus somewhat removed (though of course, remember, we are all connected in some way via the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game) from our daily pop-cultural lives. Celebrities heading off to the other side of the world to do ads is often a thing, and there are some surprising ones out there, and they’re usually Japanese.

Brad Pitt, for example, whose superstar quotient is off the scale, is a regular in Japan, advertising Roots Coffee, Edwin clothes, and Softbank telecoms. Angelina Jolie has also appeared as the face of Shiseido cosmetics, while Harrison Ford has put out for Kirin lager. David Beckham has been a popular advertising face in Japan for 15 years or more, helping to shift chocolate, cosmetics (with spouse Victoria) and clothes. However, his image was recently used without his permission to advertise a Chinese brand of hair gel with the unfortunate translated name of “Cock Grease”.

Whether we just don’t believe our celebrities are genuinely getting enthused over, say, air freshener, or we think their presence in a hard-sell ad somehow compromises the integrity of their primary role as an actor, singer or sportsman, we are very dubious about seeing superstars in the ad breaks.

Aside from, of course, when we don’t see them. Many ads do use celebrity voiceovers, allowing us to revel in the comfort of a familiar voice without having to see a gurning, dead-eyed star trying to flog us cat litter. Whether it’s Benedict Cumberbatch lending his rich tones to a suitably high-end Jaguar car ad, Bill Nighy’s long list of behind-the-scenes endorsements for the likes of Argos, Toyota and Costa coffee, or the silky purr of Joanna Lumley who could pretty much sell us anything, then we seem to be grudgingly OK with that.

This weekend’s American ads will be a different kettle of fish, though. Big, expensive and bombastic, they’ll put the stars front and centre. But, after all, to paraphrase sultry-voiced Dervla Kirwan from the Marks & Spencer food porn ads of a while back, these won’t be just any old commercial breaks. These will be Super Bowl commercial breaks.