A couple weeks ago, I posted some predictions about what we’d see from advertisers during Super Bowl LX. The creative playbook was wide open, I said. The question was which brands would win the moment and build momentum as a result.
Now that the confetti has settled in Santa Clara (congrats to the Seahawks — sorry, Pats fans), our team at Stratacomm gathered for a roundtable to break down the tape. Some of what we predicted landed squarely. Some of it didn’t. And a few things surprised us in ways worth unpacking.
The AI League Showed Up — and Then Some
In the pre-game post, I set the over/under at 9.5 AI mentions during the broadcast. That number wasn’t even close. AI didn’t just show up — it dominated. In addition to the brand plays from OpenAI and Anthropic (more on that in a minute), we had Oakley Meta, Amazon Alexa+, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Genspark, Squarespace and Wix all hyping AI-powered product solutions. For those keeping score at home, that’s more ads for AI-powered platforms (nine) than traditional beer and auto ads combined.
But the more interesting story for the post game to me isn’t how many AI ads ran. It’s how differently two of the biggest players approached the same stage.
Anthropic ran what might be the sharpest competitive positioning play of the night. Their Claude spots, running pregame and in the first quarter, were a direct shot at OpenAI’s decision to bring ads into ChatGPT. Each spot featured a person talking to a dead-eyed human standing in for an AI chatbot, who starts answering their question before pivoting mid-sentence into a product pitch. The tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
It was funny. It was pointed. And it was strategically brilliant because it did something most Super Bowl ads don’t bother doing: it drew a clear line of differentiation on an issue their target audience cares about. Sam Altman called the ads “clearly dishonest” on X, which — from a marketing standpoint — was exactly the reaction Anthropic wanted. When your competitor’s CEO is publicly responding to your ad, you’ve already won the attention game.
OpenAI’s Codex spot, by contrast, went the earnest “builders” route — showcasing what you can create with their tools. Solid, but it felt more like a product demo than a brand moment. Our senior digital manager, Amber Garnett, put it well during our roundtable: “Anthropic is playing the long game. They’re telling users, ‘If you’re still deciding on your AI platform, choose us — because although we’re literally advertising to you right now on TV, we won’t when you’re inside Claude.’” In a race for adoption where ChatGPT has a pretty big lead with consumers, not a bad play.
Pepsi’s Polar Bear Was the Best Ad of the Night. Fight Me.
When our team was picking favorites, Pepsi’s revival of the polar bear was an intergenerational standout. But what made it work wasn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake — it was the execution.
Here’s what Pepsi did: They took one of the most recognizable characters in advertising (one that, let’s be honest, most people associate with Coca-Cola) and recontextualized it through a taste test. The polar bear tries Pepsi, has an existential crisis, and sets out on a journey of self-discovery. It’s cheeky without being mean. And the bear’s understated charisma carries the story without needing a celebrity cameo or a gimmick (although the Coldplay jumbotron reference integration is just…. Chef’s kiss y’all).
(for those who DO want to fight me on this, I was fascinated to see the Ad Age coverage on Gen Z marketer reaction to this one. I guess I’m not shocked that people are entrenched on the Coke vs. Pepsi question, but 54% <= 3 stars? C’mon now….)
MrBeast, Salesforce, and the Engagement Play I’m Still Watching
I talked in my first post about the pre-game release, but if you want to talk about extending a Super Bowl ad beyond its airtime, Salesforce and MrBeast are running the most complicated playbook this side of Mike McDaniel.
The spot itself was a 30-second puzzle challenge — MrBeast walking through a vault, teasing clues, offering a million dollars to the first person to crack the code. The spot got so much engagement from the audience that the email verification system literally broke from the traffic, which is…. something to say about a SAAS company. 😳 As of this writing, nobody has solved it yet, and MrBeast is still dropping clues across his channels.
From a pure engagement standpoint, this is fascinating. Salesforce essentially turned an $8 million ad buy into a potentially weeks (months?) long participatory campaign. The spot wasn’t designed to explain Slackbot’s features — it was designed to create a behavior loop where millions of people keep coming back to a Salesforce-hosted property to engage with the brand. That’s a fundamentally different ROI calculation than “did people remember our ad on Monday morning?”
I’m genuinely curious to see the long-tail data on this one. Early signs are that engagement is off the charts, but will the puzzle drive actual Slack preference and adoption? Do enterprise buyers notice / care? Or was it purely a consumer awareness play that engages a young demo but doesn’t convert to business impact?
The origin story is worth noting, too. This whole thing started from a December tweet where MrBeast said he’d been sitting on a Super Bowl ad idea for years, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff replied in the comments. That’s how a Fortune 500 company ended up handing creative control to a 27-year-old YouTuber. The fact that it worked says something about where influence and brand deals at the highest levels actually live right now.
Novartis Won the “Why Didn’t We Think of That” Award
Our team’s unofficial favorite? Novartis’ “Relax Your Tight End.” It’s a Team Stratacomm top pick for good reason.
The setup: Current and former NFL tight ends — Gronk, Kittle, Tony Gonzalez, Greg Olsen and others — all shown in full uniform doing absurdly relaxing things. Floating in pools. Doing yoga. Painting. Brushing horses. All set to Enya’s “Only Time.” Coach Bruce Arians, who’s a prostate cancer survivor himself, delivers the message: Early detection starts with a simple blood test. The punchline — “relax your tight end” — lands because the whole spot has been building to it with a perfectly straight face.
What makes this noteworthy from a strategy perspective: It’s a pharma company using contextually perfect celebrity casting (tight ends, during the biggest football event of the year) to deliver a genuine public health message. They’re not selling a product. They’re driving a behavior change: Getting men to stop avoiding prostate cancer screenings. And they partnered with the NFL directly to get players in real uniforms, which is a literal and figurative big deal.
This is the kind of work that reminds me why I love the creativity in this industry. It’s creative that serves a purpose beyond brand awareness, and it perfectly uses the cultural moment to deliver a message that actually matters to a male audience in a way they can hear it.
Checking the Rest of the Prediction Scorecard
A few quick hits on how the other pre-game calls played out:
“The reveal is dead.” Confirmed. The vast majority of Super Bowl spots dropped early — full versions, teasers, social rollouts weeks in advance. Dunkin’ was teasing their ’90s sitcom premise during the Grammys. State Farm was everywhere with Halfway There Insurance. Coverage of the teaser ads was ubiquitous and the multichannel blitz of extensions is only growing.
This is a mindset we keep talking about at Stratacomm: The Super Bowl spot (or hero spot in any campaign) has to be an ignition point, not the whole fire. The brands that win are building integrated campaigns where the broadcast ad is just one chapter and the story is much, much bigger.
Throwbacks made a massive comeback. We called this one, but the scale was bigger than expected. Dunkin’s “Good Will Dunkin’” spot went all-in on ‘90s sitcom nostalgia — Affleck, Aniston, LeBlanc, Jason Alexander, Ted Danson, Jaleel White, Jasmine Guy and of course Tom Brady in a wig. It was a who’s-who of Gen X and millennial comfort TV, and it worked because the brand leaned into the bit completely. They even temporarily went back to “Dunkin’ Donuts” for the spot. Xfinity reunited the Jurassic Park cast. T-Mobile brought back the Backstreet Boys. The nostalgia play was everywhere.
“Who’s crashing the party?” Honestly, no massive surprise brand broke through this year. The AI companies were the biggest new entrants, but we predicted that. The roster of advertisers was broad — pharma had a strong showing, snack brands went big — but there wasn’t a “Coinbase QR code” moment where a category outsider stole the show (notwithstanding another Coinbase surprise reveal singalong).
So, What Does This Mean for the Rest of Us?
All of this roundtable discussion got me thinking about how these themes connect to the work we do every day at Stratacomm. Multi-channel activation isn’t a Super Bowl luxury — it’s the baseline expectation for any campaign that needs to reach audiences across platforms, whether you’re a Fortune 500 brand or a federal agency running a behavioral safety campaign. The strategic integration of the right voices (celebrities, influencers, subject matter experts) to reach specific audiences is something we build into our client work across custom video, social, audio, and everything in between.
What I’m proudest of is that our team already thinks this way. The creative, strategic and client-serving minds at Stratacomm don’t need a Super Bowl to understand that great campaigns are built on clear differentiation, multi-platform storytelling, and creative that respects the audience’s intelligence.
Now if only someone could solve that MrBeast puzzle. I’ve got a few people on my team who I suspect are quietly working on it….
Want more from Team Stratacomm’s Super Bowl roundtable? A few highlights from the room:
Executive producer Holly Powers thought Bud Light and Dove set the standard for production quality, writing, and storytelling this year.
Senior copywriter Elizabeth Rossio noticed a strong Americana undercurrent across the ad lineup — family, work ethic, and heartland values woven through brand after brand.
Senior account executive Lexus Cole was impressed by the movie trailer ads and how studios used animation and minimal content to build anticipation without spoilers.
And media director Kris Smith flagged something worth watching: early data suggests storytelling and nostalgia outperformed high production value, which tracks with the broader shift toward short-form, authentic content.
