This week’s Pace Notes:
The most-watched automotive ad of Super Bowl week didn't run in the Super Bowl. It starred a wall-mounted novelty fish from 1999.
Jeep skipped the broadcast entirely, dropped a two-minute online film built around Big Mouth Billy Bass, and out-performed every automaker that actually paid for a slot. If you run creative for a brand in this space, this is the most useful case study of the year, and almost everyone is about to take the wrong lesson from it.
Let’s get into it →
What we’re breaking down:
Why Jeep's "Billy Goes to the River" beat the brands that bought Super Bowl airtime, what actually drove the win, and the exact playbook you can run on any budget to get the same effect.
The winning line:
You are not going to win the feed by outspending Toyota. Good news: you don't have to.
Jeep proved it. They released an online-only film for the new Cherokee hybrid, timed it to Big Game week, and let it ride organically. The result: the No. 1 automotive ranking on YouTube's AdBlitz leaderboard, 5th out of all 118 entries, ahead of the three automakers who did pay to be in the broadcast: Toyota, Volkswagen, and Cadillac. More than 20 million views and over 246,000 engagements across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.
Here's the real win: the new Cherokee hybrid landing page saw daily visits jump 65% after launch. That's actual mid-funnel intent moving because of a piece of creative, exactly the outcome your brand needs every month.
A heritage automaker just demonstrated that concept plus clever distribution beats expensive placement. That's a lever you can pull at any budget; a Super Bowl slot is not.
Why most people get it wrong
The lazy takeaway is "be funny" or "go cheap." Wrong on both counts.
That spot was not an accident and it was not cheap. It was directed by the same filmmaker behind Jeep's Emmy-nominated "Groundhog Day," built with a real agency, and blended puppetry, CGI, and AI post. The win had nothing to do with budget being low. It had to do with three things being right:
One → it led with a concept, not a product. The brief was the single most boring thing you can sell: safety features. Instead of a spec montage, they wrapped the entire safety story inside a comedy about a father, a son, and a fish that wants to go to the river. The product is in nearly every scene, but it never has to beg for attention. The story carries it.
Two → the concept was ownable and repeatable. Billy Bass is a trademarked character, not a one-off gag. It's the same move Goodyear makes with the Blimp and Pennzoil makes with the Joyride series: a recurring device people recognize on sight, that you can run for years. Highdive had already done this for Jeep with Iliza Shlesinger and the Grand Wagoneer. It’s scalable by design.
Three → it was distributed organically. A Super Bowl slot is one placement in one format on one night. Jeep cut this for five platforms and let the algorithms find the audience. That's the whole game now. It’s called relevance media. The creative determines the reach, so a strong concept distributed everywhere will out-travel a media buy every time. Social > linear TV.
The line to remember
Spend buys you a slot. Concept buys you recall. Only one of those compounds.
How to run their play
Start with a story, not a spec sheet. If your product benefit is “boring,” then that's the signal to wrap it in a story.
Build something ownable you can run for years. A recurring character, device, or visual you control. One great concept beats ten disposable ads, and it gets cheaper to produce every time you reuse it.
Bake the product into the story. Keep it present in nearly every frame without asking for attention. Recognition should build naturally as the story moves, not get stapled on at the CTA.
Distribute natively to every platform. Don't rent one slot. Cut the same idea for each feed and let relevance do the targeting. Reach follows the creative now, not the budget.
Measure a business metric. Views are a vanity metric. Track the thing that moves the business like landing-page visits, add-to-carts, and booked calls.
You don't need the Super Bowl. You need ads good enough that the platforms hand you the reach for free.
Cheers,
Sterling Voth
Founder, Voth Agency
P.S. - If you want to level up your ad creative, we build cinema-grade digital ads (Meta, Google, CTV, etc.) for 8+ figure automotive brands that are serious about making money. Check it out here.