Duracell’s Super Bowl Shock: Commercial Shows Tom Brady Running Out of Power

Brian Steinberg
·4-min read

Battery giant Duracell hoped for a Super Bowl shock Sunday when it tied its well-known power units to Tom Brady, the famous quarterback who is capping off a first season as an NFL announcer for Fox.

A commercial for the Berkshire Hathaway storage cell makes viewers think they have returned to the Big Game from an ad break, with Fox Sports’ Brady and his on-air partner, Kevin Burkhardt, talking to viewers about the action. “All right, Tom, your thoughts?” asks Burkhardt. Before Brady can get out a single word, he appears to shut down.

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Within seconds, a “Duracell Scientist” appears on the scene and immediately diagnoses the problem: Someone has powered Brady with non-descript batteries, and “winners like Tom here only run on Duracell.” The quarterback’s inner machinery says he also likes blueberry smoothies, avocado and lemon, but it’s Duracell that gets Brady back to full power quickly.

Duracell is counting on the Brady connection, says Ramon Velutini, president of the business in the U.S. and Latin America. Sports fans and pundits have been weighing in all season on his sportscasting abilities in this first year on the job at Fox, he says, and the commercial plays off that chatter. “Everyone’s going to be watching Brady. Is he going to say the wrong thing? Is he going to be great?” Now, with the ad, “even Brady is having a little bit of fun with that.”

Brady has acknowledged a season filled with commentary about his commentary.

“When you step into this role,” he told reporters during a press conference last week, “and you embrace kind of the uncertainty of it, the only thing you do is work as hard as you can to prepare yourself, knowing that you’re going to wish you did some things over.”

Without the buzz around Brady, says Velutini, a commercial might not have succeeded, even though it brings a new ad character, the Duracell Scientist, to a bigger stage. The figure was introduced in the fall of 2024 and has spurred positive reaction among consumers. At the Super Bowl, however, “you have a bar that’s the highest all year, with all the advertisers trying to get their message through in the most compelling way. You need to go for something that is going to break though,” he adds. “We are trying unapologetically to sell Duracell batteries.”

Duracell doesn’t work without a playbook. Procter & Gamble tested this play in the not-too-distant past. Tide in 2017 created a winning commercial about Fox Sports commentator Terry Bradshaw trying to get a stain off his shirt. The former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback even appeared on camera in a dirty shirt before the commercial started, then veered into a frenetic adventure in the ad break.

Other marketers have tried to use Big Game trappings to get viewers to pay extra attention to their ads. General Motors got NBC’s pre-show audience for Super Bowl XLIX riled up when a commercial that ran just before kickoff appeared to go black, making it seem as if the feed of the game had been disrupted by some sort of technological mishap. After crucial seconds of silence, audiences were told they could stream the Super Bowl in a Chevrolet Colorado because of its superb wi-fi.

Fox’s help was critical to the effort. The network arranged the commercial break in which the clever ad appeared so that Duracell’s was the last before the network returned to game action.

There may have been other behind-the-scenes obstacles. A Super Bowl commercial for Instacart includes appearances by many of the most-recognized icons created by Madison Avenue — including the Energizer Bunny. Velutini says he was not informed about that ad. TV networks work very diligently to keep commercials from direct rivals separated so as not to blur them in consumers’ minds.

Selling batteries requires a spark, says Velutini. No one who buys one sees it work, he says. They always do their job from within the device they power. “I always say that when it comes to batteries, that part of your brain reserved to think about batteries is very small and that part to battery advertising is even smaller,” he says.

Plans for the work with Brady and Burkhardt came together very quickly. Duracell’s Velutini happened to meet Brady late last year at an event and asked if he might be interested in working with the company. When the quarterback said yes, Duracell executives leapt into action, even though they had very little time. The company signed a deal with Fox for the ad on December 26, says the executive.

“You can’t imagine how my last month has been,” he says.

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