The Super Bowl Shuffle

The Super Bowl is the only moment in the media landscape where attention, scale, and cultural relevance converge. For decades, ads have created monocultural moments through collective discovery. One night, one feed, one shared reaction. The ads have been studied in marketing classes and continue to serve as a masterclass in buyer psychology and consumer behavior. 

The founder of Ro (a first-timer to the Super Bowl this year), Z Reitano, broke down in his recent article on X how Super Bowl ads are different from regular ads for a few reasons: 

However, a Super Bowl ad is just one touchpoint for brands. 

At one point, it could anchor an entire media strategy. Now, at a time with infinite touchpoints and channels, a single ad no longer feels like the center of gravity, but rather just one more impression competing for space. 

The Super Bowl is one of the last legacy media solutions left, built for a time when attention converged in one place rather than being scattered across channels and formats. But now, with more touchpoints than ever before, do these ads still create relevance for brands when they are spending more than ever for less certainty?

Super Bowl ads no longer operate in a vacuum. They are the most visible artifact of massive omnichannel campaigns spanning social, creators, PR, OOH, email, and internal alignment, all designed create an end-to-end brand experience across the entire funnel. What looks like a single moment is actually a phased rollout before, during, and after the game, engineered to maximize reach, exposure, and resonance.

In theory, this level of amplification should increase ROI. In practice, it often exposes the opposite problem. If the ad doesn’t have meaning or resonance to begin with, no amount of distribution can manufacture it. 

When a Super Bowl ad requires dozens of supporting touchpoints to “work,” it raises a harder question: is the moment the driver, or simply the loudest expression of effort happening elsewhere?

In trying to justify the investment, brands have also stripped away the very thing that once made the Super Bowl culturally powerful: shared discovery. The surprise-and-delight factor is gone. 

We no longer wait for the game to see which brands or celebrities will show up. Ads are teased weeks in advance, announced like press drops, and optimized across every channel. The system performs exactly as designed. The moment, however, loses its magic.

Having a Super Bowl ad is major clout for any brand. But just because they have an ad doesn’t mean it will be good. Over the last few years, fewer and fewer ads have stood out, with many blending together around the same bits and narratives. 

And let’s not forget the celebrities.

Celebrities have always been an attractive tool for brands to leverage because of their mass appeal and recognition, but over the last several years, they’ve become overused and a substitute for creativity rather than an enhancement. 

In 2025 alone, over half the ads—63 percent—featured celebrity cameos. 

Brands assume that just because they feature a celebrity, it’s a one-way ticket to recognition and recall. But the opposite happens: audiences remember the celebrity, not the brand. 

It might be easy to capture attention with a celebrity, but hard to keep it. 

Alternatively, brands are increasingly tapping creators to star in their ads. Creators like Alix Earle and Addison Rae star in commercials in the past (according to CreatorIQ, 148 brands activated creators during Super Bowl week).

Not only is it more cost-effective for brands ($2,500+ per post for creators verus $3-5 million for celebrities), but you also have the trust factor. Influencers and creators build more trust with audiences than celebrities do because they are more relatable. 

This year, we’re seeing the king of creators himself, MrBeast, team up with B2B software giant Salesforce for its spot, which could usher in a new era in how brands define “star power” in their ads. 

For most brands, advertising at the Super Bowl is a very risky gamble. 

It’s not just the $8 million slot CMOs need to justify ROI on; it’s:

All of this, for a brand total of $16-29M in committed media and production spend. 

Advertising mostly drives brand awareness at the top of the funnel, but it can also optimize customer acquisition cost (CAC) by driving sign-ups, fostering word of mouth, and planting seeds to keep the brand top of mind. 

That said, if a brand makes a multi-million-dollar investment like this, they need a solid measurement plan in place to assess short- and long-term impact following the ad. 

Do it wrong and you end up like John Merris, the CEO of Solo Brands, who parted ways with the company after Solo Stove’s 2024 Super Bowl ad featuring Snoop Dogg failed to deliver expected sales growth. 

But for most brands, real economic impact shows up long after the ad airs. It creates moments of conversation and is referenced for years to come (think Apple’s 1984 ad). Yet, a multimillion-dollar ad buy doesn’t guarantee recall, emotional connection, or long-term brand lift, so it’s a huge risk, especially if you don’t know how the ad will land with your audience.

Brands like HexClad, Avocados From Mexico, and various car brands are pulling their slots, reevaluating spending, and reallocating it to a safer bet where they can prove ROI, such as the World Cup, Winter Olympics, and streaming during seasonal sports programming. 

The Super Bowl has quietly shifted from a meaning-making engine to a meaning amplifier. It still delivers scale and visibility, but only when there’s already something coherent to amplify. On its own, the moment can’t manufacture belief, relevance, or trust.

In a new media landscape, the strongest brands design systems that allow meaning to accumulate over time. Moments like the Super Bowl serve as a culmination, not a point at which it begins. They underline what’s already been established rather than introducing it.

The real question isn’t whether brands should advertise during the Super Bowl. It’s whether they’re asking it to do work it can no longer do on its own.