Every year I park myself in front of the TV on Super Bowl Sunday with two mindsets running at once. One half of me is just a fan eating wings and yelling at the screen. The other half is the ad guy, picking apart every frame, every casting choice, every music cue.
Thirty seconds of airtime cost $8 million this year. That’s the sticker price before you factor in production, talent, licensing, and the months of agency work behind every spot. The stakes have never been higher, which means the pressure to justify that spend has also never been greater.
So how are brands making it work? Three things stood out to me this year: celebrity-driven social reach, nostalgic references, and music that does the heavy emotional lifting.
Tapping Into Collective Memories and Emotions
The celebrity play isn’t new, but the logic behind it has evolved. Brands aren’t just paying for a famous face on screen anymore. They’re paying for what happens after the spot airs: the Instagram posts, the tweets, the TikTok reactions. When you cast someone with 40 million followers, you’re not just buying a performance. You’re buying distribution.
The other big lever this year was music:
- “Free Bird” for Budweiser
- “Sweet Caroline” for Hellmann’s
- Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” for Liquid I.V.
- “Get Up Offa That Thing” for Levi’s
- “Somewhere Only We Know” for Lay’s
Every one of these songs comes pre-loaded with feeling. You hear the first few notes and your brain fills in the rest with memories, moods, and emotional context. That’s incredibly powerful in a 30- or 60-second window. You don’t have to build the emotion from scratch. The song does it for you. Smart brands know this, and this year they leaned into it hard.
AI Wants to Be in the Game
AI brands had a big presence this year. Svedka ran what it called the first “primarily” AI-generated national Super Bowl ad, and it sparked exactly the kind of debate you’d expect about whether AI belongs in the creative process at that level.
Meanwhile, Anthropic, maker of Claude, took a direct shot at OpenAI with a spot calling out the introduction of ads into ChatGPT. OpenAI’s Sam Altman fired back on social media. Meta x Oakley, Amazon, Ring, and Google all showcased AI-powered products in their spots too.
I’m watching this space closely. AI is a game-changing tool that every smart marketer is investing in, but the conversation about where the human ends and the machine begins is only getting more complicated.
The Ads That Caught My Eye
Beyond the big trends, a handful of spots really stood out to me, not necessarily because they were the flashiest, but because the strategy behind them was sharp.
Lay’s: “The Last Harvest”
This one got me. In a Super Bowl dominated by comedy and spectacle, Lay’s went the other direction. They told a real story about a real farming family and the emotional weight of passing a legacy from father to daughter. Set to “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane, the spot pulls on the heartstrings but not in a contrived way.
It’s on brand and incredibly relevant right now. Real potatoes, grown by real American farmers, with a genuine changing-of-the-guard story at the center. In today’s climate, that kind of authenticity resonates.
Dunkin’: “Good Will Dunkin'”
Dunkin’ reimagined “Good Will Hunting” as a ’90s sitcom, dropped Ben Affleck back into a Boston Dunkin’, and surrounded him with sitcom legends pulling from “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “The Fresh Prince,” “Family Matters,” “A Different World,” and “Cheers.” Jennifer Aniston showed up in full “Rachel” mode and revealed Tom Brady as her boyfriend.
What I found most interesting from a strategy standpoint is who this ad is really talking to. This is a Gen X and older Millennial nostalgia play. That tells me something about where Dunkin’ is aiming its targeting.
“The Adventures of Cliff Booth”: Surprise Trailer Drop
Netflix dropped a surprise trailer for the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” sequel during the game with zero prior buildup. No title card. No traditional preview structure. Just quick cuts and teasing dialogue.
What really struck me is that the trailer never mentions the movie’s title. It relies entirely on Pitt’s face and the Netflix logo to dare you to go find out more. They also kept the trailer off the internet, which is almost unheard of today. Scarcity fueled the social conversation. Bold strategy.
Xfinity: Jurassic Park Reunion
Another nostalgia bomb. Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, and Sam Neill reunited in a Jurassic Park-themed ad that essentially argues reliable Wi-Fi could have saved the park. Like Dunkin’, this is targeting Gen X and older Millennials with a massive celebrity ensemble. But the smart part is the brand integration.
Uber Eats: “Hungry for the Truth”
Bradley Cooper is back, fighting the football-was-invented-to-sell-food conspiracy, and trying to convince Matthew McConaughey it can’t be true. Repeating the same concept from last year is always a risk, but the absurd coincidences they uncover are genuinely entertaining, and the whole thing is self-aware enough to work.
I love the Cooper-McConaughey dynamic, and there really are an insane number of food references baked into football if you start looking. Also, shoutout to the Eagles getting some love in there.
Pepsi: “The Choice”
This was one of the boldest moves of the night. Pepsi put one of Coca-Cola’s most iconic symbols, a polar bear, in a blindfolded taste test, and had it choose Pepsi Zero Sugar. Stealing your competitor’s mascot and using it against them is risky. Whether it pays off long-term remains to be seen, but it absolutely achieved the goal of getting people talking. And at the Super Bowl, that’s half the battle.
The Final Point
The brands that stood out the most committed to a point of view. Lay’s committed to emotion. Dunkin’ committed to nostalgia. Netflix committed to mystery. In a sea of $8 million spots, conviction is what cuts through.
Congrats to the Seahawks, and we’ll see you next season. #gobirds