Everyone Hates Ads. Except on Super Bowl Sunday

You get what you pay for—and that's a good thing

“The Super Bowl is such an egregious waste of money. Brands who advertise during its ad breaks are stuck in the past.”

This is the gist of pretty much every marketing department’s water cooler conversation come February. And they’re right about one thing: Super Bowl spots are astronomically expensive, and keep rising. Yet for some, they remain the biggest value in advertising.

In 2025, a 30-second SB spot cost an eye-popping $8 million, up 88 percent in the past decade. You can hear the water-cooler protests: “$8 million? That’s more than my entire annual budget!” But they are missing a very important point. The Super Bowl is the only remaining cultural moment where viewers utter the words, “I just watch for the commercials.”

You get massive reach. An estimated 127.7 million live viewers in the U.S. alone—consistently the most-watched TV broadcast annually—plus as many as 1 billion social media impressions worldwide. But what you really score, and why a Super Bowl spot is still worth the money, is active attention. No doom-scrolling, second-screening or autoplays. All eyes stay firmly fixed on the ads. And that is a rare luxury in today’s over-saturated, uninspired content slop fest.

Everyone shouts “SHUSH!” when the Super Bowl’s commercial block starts, not when it ends. How unique is that? Imagine if one day a year, everyone on TikTok scrolled past all the content they normally prefer and paused to view every paid ad in their feed? Wouldn’t you hammer that day with your best content? I certainly would.

It’s no wonder, then, that the Super Bowl’s commercial space has become a culture unto itself. There are podcasts about the ads. There are articles ranking the ads. There are friend groups who bet on whose ad will be the funniest, longest and the best. On one day of the year, advertising boasts an actual fandom.

It’s important to note, however, that the tried and trusted “famous face and hooky tagline” formula no longer works. It’s too disposable, a one-hit wonder. What great brands do these days is use their Super Bowl moment to introduce a new “world.” One that unfolds in the coming weeks, months or even years. That way, the commercial’s impact will reverberate long after its live broadcast.

Look at our client Nike, for example. In 2025, they returned to the Super Bowl after a 27-year hiatus with “So Win” (by W+K Portland). Broadcasting this badass, women-only, hair-raising ad during the Super Bowl—ostensibly a male-heavy cultural event—was vintage Nike. But the spot alone wasn’t the true brilliance.

What really resonated were the mini campaigns, one for each athlete featuring in the commercial, that flooded Nike’s social channels in the subsequent weeks. Creators and micro-influencers remixed the campaign with their own spin and memes accentuated the raw attitude of the athletes. This ensured the campaign lived on in feeds, timelines and comment sections for months to come.

So, why do Super Bowl ads matter more now than ever? Why does the commercial break’s value continue to go up when the value of traditional media has broadly diminished?

As the adage goes, “quality over quantity.” Simply, people pay attention to strong content. For most of the year, consumers see marketers as pirates, using the cheapest possible tactics to commandeer people’s attention. But for one day only, the biggest audience in the world is willing, even eager, to be marketed to. Why? Because, just like the players on the field vying for a ring, they know advertisers will bring their A-games.

So, contrary to what the marketing water coolers might say, in 2026, the Super Bowl is still Super.