You don't have to watch the Super Bowl to see every ad shown during the pregame, the game, and the postgame celebrations. YouTube and other platforms will have a rundown of every ad aired within 24 hours of the game's end.
That's fine with me. Who has time to watch a three-hour, overhyped, overblown, overdone football game that, if history is any guide, will prove to be a snoozefest?
The usual gaggle of celebrities, gee-whiz CGI, and other special effects, as well as plot lines guaranteed to try and manipulate your emotions, will converge in an event that belongs as much to Madison Avenue as Canton, Ohio, the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The average price for a 30-second spot is $8 million, though a "handful" of premium slots reportedly sold for over $10 million. To maximize its "bumper payday," NBC required many advertisers to commit to a matching $8 million buy across its other sports properties, such as the 2026 Winter Olympics and NBA games.
What will people be talking about around the water cooler Monday morning? Do companies even have water coolers anymore? In an age of remote work, hybrid work, blended work, gig work, and Starbucks, discussing Super Bowl ads is now largely an online activity.
Judging by the ads that have been teased so far, they're definitely going to have something to talk about.
"You're going to see a plethora of AI units across our entire broadcast, and their creatives are terrific," NBCUniversal's Peter Lazarus told Axios. Lazurus helms the sports advertising and partnerships division of NBCU.
"Each one of them talks a little bit differently about AI and how AI can improve your life and what it can do for you." He added, "Some of these companies you've heard of every day, and some of them, I think, will be new."
The density of tech ads in this year's Super Bowl will be slightly higher, with 16 compared to 13 in 2025. There will be a big drop in the number of food and beverage ads from 23 in 2025 to just 15 this year.
Google, Amazon, Rippling, Wix and Squarespace are among the 16 tech companies advertising this year, according to Axios' analysis, which includes only in-game, national ads on linear that were released or teased as of Feb. 5.
Anthropic announced its first Super Bowl campaign, running a 60-second pregame spot and a 30-second in-game spot that pledge Claude will be ad-free, unlike OpenAI's ChatGPT.
OpenAI is expected to advertise again this year, after running its first TV commercial during last year's game.
Salesforce is partnering with MrBeast for its spot. "Let's make the craziest Salesforce-Slack love child ad the world's ever seen," CEO Marc Benioff said to him in an X post.
Meta will advertise its Oakley smart glasses in two 30-second spots, featuring running back Marshawn Lynch, filmmaker Spike Lee, golfer Akshay Bhatia and skateboarder Sky Brown.
For weight loss medications, health startup Hims & Hers will return to the Super Bowl this year. Ro, one of its competitors, will debut this year in a spot with Serena Williams.
Zoe Kessler, the Executive Creative Director at Johannes Leonardo ad agency, told the New York Post, “It really feels like the money’s back. People are going for it — not just with celebrity, but also the scale of things feels much bigger.”
Will Trowbridge, who heads the ad agency Saylor, said, "This is the one time of year that people actually are tuning in for ads instead of waiting to be interrupted by them. It’s an amazing time for the best and most prolific brands out there to go make the most entertaining content they can.”
For nostalgia fans, how about an ad featuring the stars of the 1993 blockbuster franchise flagship, Jurassic Park? Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum reunite to create an ad for Comcast Infinity, "speculating about how it would have been different if they’d had Wi-Fi back then," says the Post. A professor of Marketing at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University observes that using older celebrities is a way for brands to play it safe. “It’s a way for brands to say, ‘We don’t want to set off any political landmines or other landmines.”
Some experts say Instacart hit the jackpot with its Super Bowl ad.
Unlikely duo Ben Stiller and Benson Boone team up as retro Eurovision-style performers in this nostalgia-fueled ad, directed by “Being John Malkovich” filmmaker Spike Jonze.
Calling it “pure entertainment” and “pure nostalgia,” Magda Tomaszewski, Group Business Director at RGA, noted that it’s an example of a brand leaning into “true entertainment marketing and really thinking about how they can create truly entertaining spots that aren’t just advertising a product, but actually entertaining audiences.”
Trowbridge was also impressed.
“The fact that Spike Jonze made it gives it artistic credibility, combined with Ben Stiller — one of millennials’ favorite comedians — combined with GenZ’s favorite pop star … It makes for an incredible combination that will hopefully pull in audiences from all over and give them all a sense of meaning,” he noted.
Kantar's senior vice president of creative strategy Kerry Benson told Axios, "There's a recipe for Super Bowl advertising — good storytelling, being entertaining, celebrities, humor," she said. "But piling on celebrity is not quite novel as a few years ago. Celebrities get your attention and then delivering humor is usually part of what they're doing."
How about a little "manscaping"? No, they're not going "there," but it's a pretty good spot, anyway.
Kellogg's Raisin Bran featuring Captain Kirk, William Shatner. Awesome.
Some of these ads you'll never see again. Others you will wish they took off the air. For NBC, it's Christmas in February, and the nearly billion dollars in ad revenue the media giant is expecting to rake in will go a long way toward making 2026 a profitable year.
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