There won’t be many drives in Super Bowl 59. No, not on-field drives. We’re talking auto advertisers.
In this year’s Super Bowl, only Ram and Jeep, both Stellantis-owned brands, have confirmed ad buys, and the number of car ads in the Super Bowl has dropped off in recent years.
Mercedes-Benz is one of several automakers on hiatus from the Super Bowl broadcast, having run its last TV commercial in the game in 2019. Instead, the brand is looking for other ways to activate around the Super Bowl.
“Every year, it’s in consideration,” Monique Harrison, head of brand marketing for Mercedes-Benz USA, told Marketing Brew. “It comes down to the product and the story that we have to tell around it at the right time.”
Right post, right time: This year, Harrison and her team decided their focus product, the electric Mercedes-Benz G 580, would be best served by a series of social posts rolling out over Super Bowl weekend.
The ads are still football-centric starring longtime brand partner and former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, and one 30-second video shows Brees on the gridiron and behind the wheel of a G-Wagon interspersed with shots of New Orleans musicians.
The ad started running across the Mercedes-Benz USA Instagram, TikTok, Threads, X, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts on Saturday. The campaign also includes two shorter videos more focused on the vehicle than the city, and will only run through Super Bowl weekend. The videos are voiced by Jon Hamm, Mercedes’s voice actor of choice since 2010.
The posts are designed to boost awareness for the electric G-Wagon, since many people still think about the G-Class vehicles as gas-only, Harrison said.
“We’ve known it for decades and decades for a gas vehicle, so the story continues to be told that an icon has gone electric,” she said. “It’s [about] the awareness of that specific story, and it’s also [about] reaching new audiences…using Drew to help extend and tell that [story].”
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Easy, Breesy: Mercedes has partnered with Brees for about nine years, and he’s one of several ties the brand has to New Orleans. There are several Mercedes dealerships around the city, and the brand hosts annual events there, Harrison said. Beyond that, the Caesars Superdome, where this year’s Super Bowl is taking place, used to be the Mercedes-Benz Superdome before Mercedes gave up the naming rights in 2021 after a decade.
Over the years Brees has partnered with Mercedes, the NFL legend has appeared in social campaigns including around the rollout of Mercedes’s electric vehicle portfolio, Harrison said.
Long game: Mercedes has run several Super Bowl TV spots in the past, including in 2013, 2015, and 2016 through 2019. Though 2025 is shaping up to be a year of uncertainty for the auto industry, Harrison said the brand’s Super Bowl approach was decided long before this year.
The decision to go solely social was largely based on the fact that the brand didn’t have a major new product story to tell—the G 580 went to market earlier last year—but that won’t necessarily be the case come Super Bowl 60, Harrison said. Her team is already in discussions about next year’s game, she told us.
“If we are going to go on the Super Bowl stage…it should be [with] something that Americans—and the world—either hasn’t seen, or we have a new story to tell,” Harrison said.
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