If you watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, you saw something interesting.
Not the game — the ads.
102 celebrities across 39 commercials. $8 to $10 million per 30-second spot. Pepsi stole Coca-Cola’s polar bears. Liquid I.V. made toilets sing. Squarespace reunited Emma Stone with her Poor Things director. And Google gave us a heartfelt moment of a mom using AI to ease her son’s concerns about moving — showing him what their new house would look like with their own things.
Unlike most AI ads, Google made you feel something.
That last one — Google Gemini — was ranked the #1 ad of the night by Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Not because it had the biggest celebrity. Not because it was the funniest.
Because it did two things at once: it made you feel something AND clearly showed you what the product does.
That’s not a Super Bowl lesson. That’s a marketing lesson. And it applies whether your budget is $8 million or $8,000 a month.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Super Bowl 60 ads were 9% less likely to amuse viewers compared to 2025. Meanwhile, nostalgia-driven ads rose 7%.
The ads that won weren’t trying to be the funniest in the room. They were connecting emotion to a clear product message — and that’s what made them stick.
This tracks with something we’ve believed at CNV for a long time: you don’t have to choose between brand and performance. The best marketing does both at the same time. Creative that stops the scroll AND drives results.
Messaging that builds trust AND moves the needle.
Google understood this. The brands that flopped didn’t. Northwestern gave Ai.com a failing grade because viewers left the ad confused about what the product even was. Beautiful creative. Zero clarity. That’s not a Super Bowl problem — that’s a marketing problem. And we see it at every budget level.
It’s Not the Ad. It’s the System Behind the Ad.
Here’s what most people miss about Super Bowl advertising:
The brands that “won” on Sunday night didn’t just entertain. They built a system around a single message and executed it across every channel.
Take the Pepsi vs. Coke saga.
Pepsi didn’t just air a 30-second spot — they orchestrated a campaign. They released teasers weeks before the game. They hijacked Coke’s own polar bear mascot for the ad itself — the bear takes a blind taste test and chooses Pepsi, spirals into an existential crisis, visits a therapist played by Taika Waititi, and eventually finds love with another Pepsi-drinking bear in a recreation of the viral Coldplay kiss cam moment from 2025.
Then after it aired, Pepsi changed their X profile picture to the Coke polar bear and posted “The bear is finally catching up.” Mountain Dew’s account jumped in: “let’s be real it’s always been Pepsi.” The internet exploded.
The ad racked up millions of views on YouTube — and people are still talking about it days later.
That’s not a commercial. That’s a flywheel.
And they’re not the only ones who understood this. Raisin Bran planted tabloid stories about William Shatner eating cereal in his car weeks before their ad aired. By game day, people were already paying attention. The ad wasn’t the starting point — it was the payoff of a multi-week earned media campaign.
Google didn’t just run one emotional spot. They paired heartfelt storytelling with a clear product demo — and the result was an “A” grade from Northwestern’s Kellogg panel and a surge in brand search afterward.
The pattern is clear: the winners treated the Super Bowl spot as one piece of a larger system. The losers treated it as a standalone event.
When Your Audience Becomes Your Marketing Team
But here’s the wildest part of the Pepsi/Coke saga.
Coke didn’t even run a Super Bowl ad. They haven’t since 2020. And they didn’t need to respond — because their fans did it for them.
Within days, a fan-made video went viral: the polar bear waking up from a nightmare, walking to the fridge, and being relieved to find it full of Coke. Millions of views. No ad spend. No agency. No brief. Just a brand with enough emotional equity that people voluntarily carried the message forward.
That’s what omnipresence actually looks like. It’s not just being everywhere yourself — it’s building something people want to talk about without you.
Think about what that means for your business. You’ll never have Coca-Cola’s brand budget. But you can build the kind of clarity, consistency, and emotional connection that makes people want to share your story. That starts with one message, reinforced across every channel, compounding over time.
Every Strong Brand Has an Enemy
One more thing worth noticing about the Pepsi/Coke rivalry:
It isn’t a problem for either brand. It’s a feature.
Every strong brand has an enemy. Pepsi has Coke. Apple had Microsoft. Every challenger brand that’s ever broken through did it by standing against something — not just standing for something.
A magnet doesn’t work with one pole. You can’t attract without also repelling. The brands that try to appeal to everyone end up connecting with no one.
Pepsi leaned into this hard on Sunday. Their VP of Marketing called it their “challenger DNA.” The entire ad was built on the premise that they’re the alternative to the default choice. And it worked — not in spite of being polarizing, but because of it.
So here’s the question for your business: does your marketing have a point of view strong enough that some people won’t like it?
Because if it doesn’t, it probably isn’t sharp enough for the people who will.
What This Means for Your Marketing (Yes, Even at $8K/Month)
You don’t need $8 million. You need your brand story and your product message working together — not competing with each other.
Your ads shouldn’t just “look nice.” They should make someone feel something AND clearly communicate why your thing matters.
Your email shouldn’t just be clever. It should move people closer to a decision.
Your social content shouldn’t just get likes. It should reinforce the same message your ads and emails are already delivering.
Your brand shouldn’t try to please everyone. It should stand for something specific enough that the right people feel seen — and the wrong people self-select out.
One message. Every channel. Compounding. A point of view worth fighting for.
The Super Bowl just proved it on a $10 million stage. But the principle works the same at $10K
