The Super Bowl Still Matters for Brands

It’s that time of year when our industry debates the value of spending $8 million on a Super Bowl spot.

In a world where AI-driven personalisation fills endless scrolls with hyper-targeted content optimised for performance, it’s fair to ask why any brand would still see value in a premium-priced, linear TV placement.

I could walk you through the media mix models, tracking studies, and bottom-line sales impact clients have generated from past Super Bowl investments, but I’d wager you’re about as interested in reading that article as I am in writing it.

So, let’s assume your team did the math and concluded the Super Bowl can be justified for the business. (Side note: if you haven’t done the math, call me. I can help.) The more interesting question is this: how do you know the opportunity cost isn’t too high? After all, there are plenty of impressive ways to spend $8 million.

For more than 150 years, we’ve invested in screens. Cinema brought whole communities together with the marvel of moving pictures. When TV entered our homes, the experience became more intimate but no less communal. Families watched together. Conversations, perspectives, fashions and brands travelled through neighbourhoods, classrooms and offices as three networks helped shape a shared national story.

But our appetite for growth scattered the community. Cable divided viewers by interest. The internet atomised them further. When the screen jumped into our pockets, we learned to surgically target, measure, and optimise every impression. Now we live in an age of near-perfect personalisation and performance for those who know how to wield the tools.

We spend roughly 11 hours a day with media and encounter up to 10,000 ads daily. Our media arrives in echo chambers designed around our identities, interests and biases. Media has become a mirror -- reflecting and reinforcing who we already are rather than creating shared experiences.

We traded a few big stages for millions of tiny ones to satisfy the scoreboards modern marketing demands. But without big stages, we lose something. It becomes far harder for brands to create cultural artifacts -- work that everyone sees, talks about, and remembers together.

Today we measure creative not only by awareness, engagement, conversion and lift, but also by its impact on the brand, the category and, in our proudest moments, culture itself. Not every campaign aims for cultural impact. But for brands that do, the Super Bowl remains a rare opportunity. It is one of the only stages left where a brand can reach the majority of American households simultaneously.

Super Bowl ads can drive marketing metrics and business outcomes. But they also create real-world moments -- not just social chatter, but face-to-face conversations at parties, in classrooms, and around office desks. They become part of shared cultural memory in a way the newsfeed experience struggles to replicate.

Marketing KPIs are the scoreboards of the game we play. We use data to predict and influence human behaviour in pursuit of results. But real victory for brands isn’t found in optimisation alone. It lives in the combination of short-term outcomes and long-term resonance: positioning that endures, cultural commentary that shifts hearts and minds, or lines so funny, or poignant that they enter our shared lexicon.

Few moments remain where we all gather around our various screens to experience the same thing at the same time. The Super Bowl is the largest of those moments -- a single annual event where brands can step onto a national stage and speak to all of us at once.

My advice? Do the math. Expect business outcomes. But also ask yourself: If my brand had the chance to speak to nearly every adult in America at once, what story would we tell to truly make our mark?