Commercial Blitz: A Super Bowl Ad Strategy
Analyzing what we saw during the Big Game
Every year, the Super Bowl serves as the ultimate showcase - not just for football, but for brands looking to make an impact. With millions of viewers glued to their screens, the commercial breaks become a battleground where companies fight for attention, relevance, and resonance. Beyond the humor, nostalgia, and celebrity cameos, Super Bowl ads tell a much deeper story about strategic partnerships, asset leverage, and value creation - principles that align closely with the themes explored in Asset Game Plan: Unlocking Sports Value and Winning Tandems: Intro to Sports Partnerships.
The Art of Alignment: When Brands and Sports Click
One of the defining principles of a strong sports strategy is alignment: ensuring that all elements - teams, leagues, sponsors, and advertisers - are working toward a common goal. The most effective Super Bowl ads don’t just sell a product; they demonstrate how a brand fits into the culture of sports and entertainment in a way that feels natural, not forced. This mirrors the key ideas from Winning Tandems, where successful partnerships are built on shared objectives and synergy between entities.
Leveraging Assets: More Than Just a Commercial
Super Bowl ads are about more than just who can be the funniest or most heartwarming in 30 seconds. The best campaigns maximize the assets available - athletes, intellectual property, product positioning, and even other brands - to create something bigger than the sum of its parts. This directly ties to Asset Game Plan, where leveraging available resources strategically can turn an ordinary activation into an extraordinary one.
In the sports world, this mirrors how franchises and sponsors leverage each other’s strengths - teams provide engaged audiences and cultural cachet, while brands bring financial backing and additional exposure. When done right, this results in a win-win scenario that extends beyond the game itself.
The Challenge of Ad Spend Without League Rights
Not all brands advertising during the Super Bowl have official marketing rights to the NFL. This creates an interesting challenge—how do you leverage the event without directly referencing the league or its trademarks? Companies have found creative ways to insert themselves into the conversation by focusing on adjacent cultural moments, using influencers, or running digital-first campaigns that capture attention without direct association.
These strategies highlight a key lesson from Asset Game Plan: even without direct ownership of an event or a league partnership, brands can still create meaningful activations by leveraging cultural moments, influencers, and digital platforms to extend their reach.
Beyond the Laughs: Creating Real Value
While humor and nostalgia often dominate Super Bowl ads, the real winners are those that drive meaningful engagement and long-term impact. The most valuable activations are those that extend beyond the moment to create long-term brand equity. Brands that use their Super Bowl airtime to reinforce their strategic message and entertain, leave a lasting impression.
Here’s a simple Google Trends search showcasing how Dunkin’ leveraged their time. Their search results over the past seven days show a ‘heartbeat’ of daily searches for the nearest Dunkin’, especially in the mornings. When the Super Bowl ad hit, you see a spike around that time, higher than the daily search.
Same goes for a few of the other brands, even some of the largest players in sports like Nike, getting an immediate search for awareness.
Search trends are not the main way to focus on return on investment for such a large spend, but it does increase exposure to a brand. These searches, or exposure to a different audience than a typical sports team, can drive impact for awareness and purchases in the future, increasing that ROI.
What We Can Learn
For those working in sports business, Super Bowl advertising is a case study in strategy, partnership, and brand positioning.
The most effective campaigns demonstrate:
Strategic Alignment – Brands that integrate naturally into sports culture traditionally resonate more than those that feel like outsiders forcing their way in. How to overcome this? Connect back to sports or the emotions that come from being a fan to drive affinity.
Maximized Assets – The best ads leverage everything from athlete endorsements to intellectual property to create a more compelling message.
Navigating Without Direct League Rights – Companies that don’t have official partnerships with the NFL can still create high-impact activations by tapping into sports culture, influencers, and timely narratives.
Long-Term Thinking – Ads that spark conversation, reinforce brand values, and extend their impact beyond the game provide the most value.
Super Bowl ads may last only 30 seconds, but the strategies behind them have implications far beyond a single night. For those in sports strategy and marketing, the real game isn’t just on the field - it’s in how you align, leverage, and create lasting value from every partnership and opportunity to get noticed (and spend quite a bit of money). It’s now time for brands to keep the momentum going with other ways to drive impact down the line and generate return on investment.
If you made it this far, here’s a poll for my favorite ad - I’ll answer next week.