Super Bowl
The one night advertising is the programme. The spots and their budgets, the teasers and the leaks, the celebrity cameos, and the ads that failed on the biggest possible stage.
Part of Advertisements
20 moments in this segment.
- - Michael Jordan x Bugs Bunny. 1992. Nike's "Hare Jordan" Super Bowl ad, Michael Jordan playing basketball with Bugs Bunny on the moon. Spawned Space Jam (1996); the most successful athlete-cartoon crossover of all time.
- - Budweiser Frogs. January 29, 1995. Three frogs croak "Bud," "weis," "er." Aired during Super Bowl XXIX. Spawned the Budweiser lizards (1997), Wassup (1999), and effectively defined Anheuser-Busch's Super Bowl advertising era through 2012.
- - Britney Spears Pepsi Super Bowl. February 4, 2002. Britney Spears's 90-second Pepsi Super Bowl ad, a singing tour of Pepsi commercials from the 1950s to 2002. Most-talked-about Super Bowl ad of the early 2000s.
- - Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like". February 2010. Wieden+Kennedy + Isaiah Mustafa's "Smell like a man, man" Super Bowl ad. The 2010 "Response" video campaign, 186 personalised YouTube responses to fans in two days, won the Cannes Film Grand Prix. Redefined what Super Bowl ads could become.
- - Snickers "You're Not You When You're Hungry". February 7, 2010. Snickers' Super Bowl ad with Betty White as the team's exhausted player. 70 different celebrities used the template over a decade. Voted Ad Age's #1 Super Bowl ad of all time in 2014.
- - Volkswagen "The Force". February 2, 2011. VW's "The Force" Super Bowl ad, small Darth Vader trying to use the Force on household objects, then on the family Passat. Most-shared Super Bowl ad of all time at that point.
- - Chrysler "Imported From Detroit". February 6, 2011. Chrysler's Super Bowl XLV ad with Eminem driving through Detroit, narrating "Imported From Detroit." Post-2009-bankruptcy comeback ad; voted Ad Age's ad of the year.
- - Oreo "Dunk in the Dark" Tweet. February 3, 2013. During the Super Bowl XLVII power outage, Oreo tweets "You can still dunk in the dark." 16K retweets in an hour. The single most-cited "real-time marketing" moment in social-media history.
- - Always Super Bowl 2015. February 1, 2015. Always' "#LikeAGirl" Super Bowl ad, the first Super Bowl ad explicitly framed around feminist empowerment. Most-shared Super Bowl ad of 2015. Mainstreamed purpose-driven advertising in big-budget broadcast.
- - Hyundai "Hope Detector" Super Bowl. February 4, 2018. Hyundai's "Hope Detector" Super Bowl LII ad, cancer-survivor reunion with their doctors at the stadium. Voted the most-emotional Super Bowl ad of the decade by USA Today's Ad Meter.
- - Tide "It's a Tide Ad" Super Bowl 2018. February 4, 2018. Tide's Super Bowl LII campaign, every commercial revealed to be "secretly a Tide ad." Won Best Super Bowl Ad of 2018 across all critic polls. The meta-advertising peak.
- - Tubi "Interface Interrupted". February 12, 2023. Tubi's Super Bowl LVII ad, fake Fox Sports "click here to dismiss" overlay tricked millions of viewers into reaching for their remotes. The most-discussed prankster Super Bowl ad in decades.
- - Rihanna Super Bowl Halftime - Fenty Reveal. February 12, 2023. Rihanna's halftime show doubled as a Fenty Beauty product placement, the powder-touchup mid-performance went viral immediately. The defining "halftime show as advertising" moment.
- - Squarespace "Hello Down There". Squarespace's Super Bowl 58 commercial, directed by Martin Scorsese, in which aliens conclude that humans exist to stare at their phones. It belongs to the long line of ad work made by name film directors, and drew most of the week's craft coverage.
- - State Farm - Schwarzenegger and DeVito. State Farm's Super Bowl 58 commercial, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot pronounce the insurer's "neighbor" line and Danny DeVito turns up to help. A clean example of the celebrity-pairing spot that dominates modern Big Game advertising.
- - Super Bowl 58 - CeraVe + Michael Cera. February 11, 2024. CeraVe's Super Bowl LVIII ad with Michael Cera, peak ARG-style absurdism. Built up over a 6-week pre-Super-Bowl rollout of Michael-Cera-bottles. The defining "Super Bowl ad as a 6-week campaign" template.
- - Cetaphil Super Bowl 2024 - Taylor Swift Easter Egg. February 11, 2024. Cetaphil's Super Bowl LVIII ad, a father and daughter bond over Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. The TikTok-Taylor-fan-economy ad of the decade.
- - Bud Light at Super Bowl 59. Bud Light's Super Bowl 59 commercial with Shane Gillis, Post Malone and Peyton Manning. The spot was watched closely as a read on where the brand stood after two years of contested attention.
- - Mountain Dew Casts Seal as a Seal. Mountain Dew's Super Bowl 59 commercial, in which the musician Seal performs as an actual seal, with Becky G. The one-word visual pun is the kind of literal-minded joke the Big Game format rewards.
- - Super Bowl 60 - The Full Ad Reel. The complete set of official spots and extended cuts released for Super Bowl 60 in San Francisco. The game remains the single day on which the American ad industry shows its work, and the full reel is the record of what it looked like in 2026.
