Has Super Bowl Advertising Become Over-Optimized?

There's a danger of diluting the shared experience

There is exactly one day a year when advertising matters to regular people almost as much as beer, wings and their fantasy teams: Super Bowl Sunday.

For decades, it was the closest thing advertising had to a true cultural forum (sorry, Cannes). People gathered around the TV to see the Big Game spots for the first time. That’s how “Whassup?” became part of the cultural vernacular. How a kid in a Darth Vader helmet made Volkswagen feel magical again. How Tide hijacked an entire broadcast by turning every ad into a Tide ad.

These weren’t just good commercials. They were ideas that millions of real people got to experience together. The Super Bowl still pulls in more than 110 million viewers annually, making it the most-watched event in America year after year. There’s nothing else like it. There’s no other experience where brands get this level of undivided, collective attention from people who are actually excited to watch ads.

Fast forward to today, and that single-day cultural forum has quietly turned into a two-week content affair. Teasers launch on social to build buzz, ads drop early to drive engagement and content and community management surround it all to boost shelf life. The logic is understandable. Post-game wrap reports are stacked with impressions, shares and engagement rates.

But something has been lost in the process.

When everyone has already seen all the ads before the game, there’s nothing to really look forward to. There’s no “Oh shit, did you just see that?” No arguing over whether Puppy Monkey Baby was ridiculous or brilliant. We’ve over-optimized the Super Bowl in service of metrics. And in doing so, drained the anticipation and excitement out of it.

One of Tubi’s 2023 Big Game ads

The irony: Brands that actually win the Super Bowl don’t treat it like just another media buy. Doritos figured this out years ago with “Crash the Super Bowl.” Instead of talking at football fans, they handed them the keys: Make our ad! Vote on it! Root for it! Suddenly, the brand wasn’t interrupting the game, it was part of it. In 2022, Coinbase ran an ad featuring nothing but a bouncing QR code on a black screen, mimicking a DVD screensaver, which drove more than 20M+ scans to its site for free bitcoin offers. More recently, Tubi hacked the moment by convincing real people at home that someone in their group had accidentally changed the channel during the game.

No pre-release could have helped those ideas take off. They worked because they happened live, in the room, in the moment, with real people reacting together. That’s the difference.

The Super Bowl is a rare night when millions of people are actually paying attention at the same time. And that makes it fragile. Every early release, every attempt to win the week instead of the night, chips away at the very thing that makes the SB valuable in the first place.

Super Bowl advertising doesn’t need more celebrities or bigger budgets, it needs discipline. Sometimes it’s about what you don’t do that matters more than what you do.

Every once in a while, brands remember what really matters: doing something real and meaningful that real people actually care about. Inviting fans to become part of the story. Hacking the inventory. Breaking the format. And sometimes that means giving one of marketing’s biggest stories a left turn to reignite it into modern culture.

That’s the reboot the Super Bowl deserves.