So this past Super Bowl there was an ad for the upcoming Mandalorian and Grogu movie and if you weren’t paying close attention you might have genuinely thought you were watching a beer commercial. Not just a little bit. Like fully, completely, this is a Budweiser ad until the Star Wars logo shows up.
You’ve got the Sam Elliott style gravelly voiceover talking about purpose and pushing forward and bonds that get harder to break. You’ve got sweeping wide shots of vast landscapes. You’ve got a slow, emotional build that feels like it was designed to make you feel something warm in your chest before you’ve even processed what you’re actually looking at. The only difference between this and the classic Budweiser Clydesdale ads is that instead of horses you’ve got Tauntauns pulling the Mandalorian’s ship across some frozen planet.
And I genuinely don’t think that’s an accident.
The Budweiser Super Bowl ads are some of the most beloved commercials in the history of the format. People get emotional over them. They share them. They remember them years later. If you’re trying to make a piece of content that lands emotionally during the Super Bowl and you want to tap into that same warm nostalgic feeling, modeling your ad after that formula is not a crazy idea. It’s actually pretty smart.
What makes it interesting from a marketing standpoint is that it works on two levels. For people who immediately clock the Budweiser reference, there’s this moment of recognition and amusement. Oh they’re doing the Clydesdale thing but with Star Wars. That’s kind of clever. For people who don’t consciously make the connection, they just feel the emotional pull of a well crafted ad that follows a formula their brain already responds to positively without knowing why.
There’s also something kind of funny about the logistics of what’s actually happening on screen if you look closely. The ship they’re traveling in is clearly capable of hovering and presumably flying. It has that technology. And yet they’re using animals to pull it along the ground. Which on one hand is a little absurd but on the other hand feels very Star Wars in the best way. It’s that lived in, slightly illogical, this is just how things are done here quality that the best Star Wars stuff always has.
Whether this movie actually delivers is a whole other conversation. Star Wars as a brand has taken some real hits over the last several years with a string of shows that ranged from decent to pretty bad, and audience trust isn’t exactly at an all time high. The Mandalorian series itself started strong and then lost some momentum in its later seasons. So walking into a theatrical release there’s work to be done in terms of convincing people it’s worth showing up for.
But as far as Super Bowl ads go this one did what a good Super Bowl ad is supposed to do. It made people feel something, it got people talking, and it was memorable enough that people are still bringing it up. Whether that translates into actual ticket sales is the real question, but from a pure marketing craft standpoint it’s hard to argue it didn’t work.
