Brand Strategy
Marketing
The 2026 Super Bowl Ads
This week, thousands of takes will be shared about which brands “won” the Super Bowl. And while it’s fun to see it as a beauty contest, what most viewers don’t get is that the Super Bowl isn’t an ad competition, but a stage for businesses to reach a lot of people at once. How they use that stage depends on their unique goals and strategies, not all of which are to win the popularity contest that is the USA Today Admeter. One way to think about it – some movies aim to be blockbusters, others aspire to be art house favorites, and many miss both marks and become flops. Likewise, mass market consumer brands usually aim for the broadest possible audiences (e.g., beer, chips, and soda) and while others focus on a more narrow target (e.g., B2B SAAS, crypto, pharma). Very rarely, you’ll get something that achieves both Blockbuster and Art House status like Apple’s classic 1984 launch spot for the Macintosh, who many consider the best Super Bowl commercial of all time.
So rather than rank our favorite spots, we’re going to highlight brands that stayed true to their audience and delivered on strategy as well as a few that whiffed.
🍿 The Blockbusters – Mass appeal, well executed.
This spot won the USA Today Ad Meter, a second consecutive win for Budweiser. It’s familiar territory for the King of Beers, this year’s iteration of the ongoing Clydesdale story had a bit more self-awareness than in years past. After the reveal which I won’t spoil, the tongue-in-cheek line “Made of America” appears over a crisp pour of Bud, followed by a nod to a milestone with “For 150 Years, This Bud’s For You.”
While not groundbreaking, Budweiser and their agency BBDO deftly balanced humor, nostalgia, and cute animals to thread the needle this year in creating something that appealed to the widest possible swath of America, on brand for Budweiser.
Dunkin’ | Good Will Dunkin’ 🍩☕🤩
This year’s Dunkin Superbowl spot builds on the brand’s deep allegiance to its Boston roots to deliver a dizzying array of celebs rehashing their 90’s sitcom characters that made them famous. Brought to you by Artists Equity (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company), the sheer number of 90s sitcom references was impressive: from Ted Danson working the bar to Matt Leblanc’s catchphrase, it was a tour de force. I did think they missed by not having Alfonso Ribeiro do the Carlton, but maybe it was cut for time.
Over the past few years, Dunkin has doubled and tripled down on Boston, Affleck, and zany humor. It has been working for them as they have held their own vs. category leader Starbucks. This newest chapter tapped into a lot of familiar references and faces and definitely won the Celebrity Arms Race.
Rocket and Redfin | America Needs Neighbors Like You 🎶🫱🏼🫲🏽🏠
Unlike past years, most advertisers carefully avoided anything that could be construed as political. Which is why Redfin and Rocket Mortgage’s spot stood out. The story about Latino family moving into a neighborhood and the daughter reuniting a lost dog with a new neighbor was moving and the cover of “Won’t you be my neighbor” by Lady Gaga had a message of unity and a return to decency in a turbulent political climate. That said, it did feel like they stopped short of making a clearer statement here, which is a missed opportunity. While more clarity would’ve courted controversy, the more subtle approach they took is less likely to enter the cultural discourse beyond the game.
After last year’s Super Bowl spot which also featured Lady Gaga singing a quintessentially American classic in “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Redfin and Rocket are reinforcing their brand association with the American Dream. While I wouldn’t say it was provocative, in a year where most shied away, it was admirable to address the elephant in the room. Kudos to Mirimar, their agency of record.
🧠 The Art House – Focused target, smartly done.
Claude | Can I get a six pack quickly? 🤖🎯👀
This series of spots from Anthropic / Claude and ad agency Mother definitely created a lot of buzz within tech circles this week. What was most surprising about it was the fact that their first ad campaign on the biggest stage took direct aim at ChatGPT’s plans to introduce ads instead of defining their own brand. In some ways, this was a miss as most of the 120 million+ viewers likely don’t know what Claude is and the spot doesn’t show them.
Through a pitch-perfect parody of ChatGPT’s default voice, the takeaway was that ChatGPT can be super creepy. And if you know that Claude’s target audience is business users and not the masses, the approach makes more sense. Rather than try to grow their penetration into free users it doesn’t care about, Claude opted to reorient the category narrative from a two-horse race between ChatGPT and Gemini into a three-horse race by taking direct aim at the biggest player. Time will tell if this will pay off, but I like the laser focused strategic courage here.
Novartis | Relax your tight end 🏈🩸🩹
This spot probably doesn’t belong in the art house category because it was broadly popular, landing in the top ten of the Ad Meter. But the target audience is men of a certain age, specifically ones avoiding prostate cancer screenings due to the, ugh, manual nature of the test. Novartis and their agency Fallon found the perfect creative solution blending the football pun on tight ends with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek silliness to offer up their less intrusive, “finger-free” blood test option.
It hit all the right notes for the target, was honest about why men are avoiding this necessary health screening, and the joke was football-centric. Of all the spots that ran this year, I’ll go out on the limb and say this one will save the most lives.
Coinbase | Everybody Coinbase 📺🎤❓
This will be a controversial pick as it ranked dead last in the USA Today Ad Meter, but Coinbase continued to deliver on their strategy of delivering party-stopping, counter-intuitive spots in the Big Game. 2022’s retro floating QR code modeled after a DVD player screen saver evolved into a 90s era karaoke machine screen playing “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys. Did Gen Xers and older Millennials spring into song in parties across the country? Not sure. But Coinbase's record-scratch effect did create some surprise and curiosity.
Strategically, this was a pure attention play. In a sea of ads screaming for your attention, they stood out by not trying at all (Coinbase isn’t mentioned until 52 seconds into the 60). I applaud their boldness and likely “worked” in reinforcing the brand for the crypto-aware and drove brand name awareness for the unaware. Even if there was a good amount of WTF created along the way.
🙃 The Flops – Not sure what they were going for, but it didn’t work.
Oakley Meta | Athletic Intelligence 🕶️🏃🏽♀️🤔
Celebs, Athletes, and Youtubers wearing the new Oakley Meta sunglasses and talking to Meta AI while skydiving, mountain biking, and running, all culminating with the line “Athletic Intelligence is here.” Which is … not exactly clear. The user questions and commands depicted are things like playlists, weather, and video recording, which I guess are all relevant to athletes. For a category yet to catch on with mass consumers, this spot missed for me as it didn’t show me why smart glasses need to exist in the first place, much less how they’re relevant to athletes. Even if the initials are AI.
Salesforce | @MrBeast’s Vault 💸🎁😵💫
I applaud Salesforce for thinking outside the box, but this was a bridge too far for me. I assume that there’s some crossover between their target audience of CRM users and Mr. Beast, likely through their kids. But the complexity of this million dollar giveaway promotion far outpaced the 30 seconds they crammed it into. Adding to the confusion, they also introduced a new AI in Slackbot almost incidentally. If you’re not a tech insider, the connection between Slack and Salesforce isn’t obvious. Heck, most folks don’t know either brand well. Not sure who this was for other than Mr. Beast’s core audience of teenage boys.
Svedka | Shake Your Bots Off 🤖🍸🫥
A spot featuring robots that looked like it was largely made by AI for an out-of-fashion vodka with no story, no humor, no discernible message about the product. No thanks.
🏆 The Ass-et – Finally, my personal favorite ad.
Levi’s | Backstory 👖🟥🍑
Simple idea reinforcing a key brand asset – the classic Levi’s backside featuring the iconic red tab. Thrown in an extremely high level of craft from TBWA Chiat Day and a tasteful array of subtle celeb appearances including Questlove, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Rose, and Doechii and you have a very charming, beautiful ad reestablishes Levis cultural relevance.
While this won’t be the most talked about ad this year, I think it did the job well. Cool doesn’t scream about itself. You just are or you aren’t. This was cool.
That’s it from us here at CōLab. Check out the Ad Meter if you’re looking for the full list of spots and their mass audience popularity or Adweek’s Top Ten if you’re looking for the advertising industry’s POV. See you next year.
About the author
Brian "Waka" Wakabayashi is the Managing Director of CōLab, a creative studio helping world-class founders and management teams design better brands, build better products, tell better stories, and make better decisions. We were founded in partnership with WestCap, a growth equity firm, to help portfolio companies and start ups scale to the next level through our key practice areas of brand, design, growth, product, and PR.
