Beyond the Commercials: How Brands Win the Super Bowl With Content
For the 2026 Super Bowl (LX), a 30-second commercial costs approximately $8 million, continuing a trend of record-breaking prices.
Key Takeaways:
Winning the Super Bowl is not about the commercial itself, but about what happens after it. The most effective brands treat the ad as the starting point and design content ecosystems that guide attention through search, sharing, and follow-up.
Super Bowl attention is active and behavior-driven, not passive. Audiences immediately search, react, and participate, and brands that anticipate those behaviors capture far more value from the moment.
Usefulness, clarity, and cultural relevance determine whether attention compounds or fades. Content that respects intent and earns trust outperforms content that simply extends the creative.
AI accelerates execution, but it does not replace strategy. It rewards prepared teams with clarity and coordination, and exposes those without a plan by amplifying noise.
These principles are not exclusive to the Super Bowl. Any brand can create lasting impact by designing for what comes next whenever attention is earned.
Every year, the Super Bowl reminds marketers of two familiar truths. Brands will spend millions of dollars for roughly 30 seconds of attention, and by Monday morning, most conversations about those commercials will already be fading.
There was a time when that made sense. People gathered around the television specifically to watch the ads. Monday office conversations revolved around which brand “won” the night. USA Today’s ad rankings mattered. The commercial itself was the moment.
That is no longer how attention works.
Today, the Super Bowl is one of the few moments where attention, intent, and cultural conversation collide at scale. Audiences do not just watch commercials. They search for them. They replay them. They share them. They dissect them. And often, they immediately try to understand what they just saw.
The real opportunity has never been the 30-second spot. It is everything that happens after.
Yet many marketers still approach the Super Bowl like a one-night performance, concentrating nearly all their effort on the ad itself. The spot airs, performance metrics are captured, and the campaign quietly moves on. Meanwhile, audiences are actively looking for context, explanations, and something worth engaging with beyond the commercial.
The brands that consistently win understand this shift. They plan for the moment before kickoff, during the game, and after the final whistle. They treat the Super Bowl not as a single creative swing, but as a connected experience designed around how people actually behave.
That is the real lesson. It is not about budget or celebrity or airtime. It is about understanding how attention moves — and designing content that knows what to do with it.
The Super Bowl Is a Content Ecosystem, Not a One-Night Event
There was a time when the Super Bowl followed a predictable arc. A brand aired its commercial. People talked about it the next day. Then the moment passed, making room for the next campaign.
That linear model no longer exists.
Today, the Super Bowl plays out across weeks, not minutes. Brands tease creative in advance. Audiences react in real time during the game. The aftermath extends through rankings, memes, breakdowns, interviews, reaction videos, and commentary that continue long after the final whistle.
Just as importantly, people no longer experience the moment in one place. Viewers watch with a phone in hand, moving fluidly between television, search, social platforms, and group chats. The commercial may still be the spark, but it is no longer the container.
This is what turns the Super Bowl into a content ecosystem.
An ecosystem is not a collection of assets. It is a connected environment where each piece of content has a role to play. The commercial creates awareness. Searchable content answers questions. Social content shapes conversation. Longer-form assets provide depth and context for those who want to go further.
AI has accelerated the speed at which this ecosystem operates. Clips are shared instantly. Commentary is published in real time. Content travels farther and faster than ever before. But acceleration does not create strategy. It simply amplifies whatever planning already exists.
The brands that benefit most are the ones that design for the full journey. They anticipate how attention will move and ensure there is something relevant waiting at each step. When brands plan only for the moment of exposure, they miss the journey that actually creates value.
The Commercial Is the Line of Scrimmage, Not the End Zone
A great Super Bowl commercial can do many things well. It can capture attention. It can entertain. It can spark curiosity. What it cannot do is carry the entire weight of a brand’s message on its own.
That expectation is a holdover from a different era.
When commercials were experienced passively, the ad itself was often the end of the journey. Today, the moment an ad airs, behavior shifts. Viewers reach for their phones. They search for the brand. They look up the celebrity cameo, the song, or the meaning behind the creative choice they did not immediately understand.
The commercial does not conclude the interaction. It sparks it.
This is where many campaigns quietly fail — not because the ad missed the mark, but because nothing meaningful followed. The spot is polished, memorable, and expensive, yet there is no clear destination for the curiosity it creates.
For executives, this is rarely a creative problem. It is a structural one. Incentives, timelines, and organizational silos still place disproportionate emphasis on the ad itself, even as audience behavior has moved on.
The strongest Super Bowl campaigns recognize this gap. They treat the commercial as the opening scene, not the entire story. The ad earns attention. The surrounding content is designed to capture intent, answer questions, and move the audience forward.
If the commercial creates curiosity, the rest of the content must know what to do with it.
The Rise of Useful Content During the Super Bowl
Not every brand that advertises during the Super Bowl is trying to be the loudest. The brands that extract the most long-term value are often the ones that show up with something useful the moment curiosity hits.
This represents a quiet but important shift. For years, post-game content was treated as an afterthought — a place for fine print, legal language, or generic brand pages. Today, it is where intent reveals itself.
TurboTax has understood this dynamic for more than a decade. Its Super Bowl commercials reliably use humor and recognizable personalities to break through the noise.
The Expert feat. Adrien Brody: TurboTax 2026 Super Bowl Commercial
But the real strategy becomes visible once the ad ends. Viewers who search are not met with abstract brand messaging. They find clear explanations, practical guidance, and reassurance around a problem they already feel anxious about: getting their taxes right.
The humor earns attention. The surrounding content earns trust.
That distinction matters. Useful content respects intent. It acknowledges that curiosity is often driven by uncertainty, not entertainment alone. Instead of asking audiences to work harder to understand the message, it meets them where they are and helps them move forward.
Importantly, usefulness outlasts the commercial itself. While the ad may fade from memory, the supporting content continues to surface through search, sharing, and recommendation well after game day. In that sense, usefulness is not a creative compromise. It is a strategic multiplier.
When brands design content that anticipates what people will want next, attention stops being fleeting and starts becoming productive.
Post-Game Halo Effect: The Moment Search Decides the Outcome
Once the Super Bowl ends, one behavior is nearly guaranteed: people search.
They search for the commercial they missed, the brand behind the spot, the celebrity cameo, the song choice, or the meaning behind a moment that caught their attention. That surge of curiosity creates a post-game halo effect that can last days or even weeks.
What happens next is where value is either compounded or lost.
Some brands anticipate this behavior. They ensure that the content audiences find is directly connected to the story the commercial introduced. Others send that traffic to generic landing pages or thin brand experiences that offer little relevance to what viewers are actually looking for.
Search, in this context, is not an SEO tactic. It is a behavioral reality. People will go looking for answers whether a brand is prepared or not. Strategy determines whether that moment becomes engagement or a dead end.
AI has raised the stakes. Content can now be created and published at unprecedented speed, which makes clarity more important than ever. Being early matters, but being relevant matters more. When everything is searchable, precision becomes the differentiator.
The commercial creates curiosity. Search determines whether that curiosity turns into something meaningful.
Why Some Super Bowl Ads Stick
The Super Bowl is one of the few moments when brands are not just tolerated in culture — they are invited into it. Whether they stay there depends on how easily the idea travels.
Some campaigns become part of shared memory. Others disappear as soon as the broadcast ends.
Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl campaigns worked not simply because the ads were entertaining, but because they invited participation at a time when most brands still controlled every creative decision.
NFL Focus Groups - Doritos Crash the Super Bowl 2025
By opening the door to fans, Doritos turned viewers into contributors and extended the campaign far beyond game day. The ads lived on not just because people remembered them, but because people felt a sense of ownership.
Budweiser’s Clydesdale commercials succeeded for a different reason. They captured emotions people wanted to pass along — nostalgia, resilience, unity. Over time, those ads became cultural shorthand. You did not need to rewatch them to remember how they made you feel.
Budweiser | Super Bowl LX Commercial 'American Icons'
This is the distinction that matters. Shareability is not about reach. It is about meaning. When people share something, they attach their own point of view to it. That makes sharing an act of identity, not amplification.
AI has accelerated how quickly ideas move, but it has not changed why they move. Clarity, emotional resonance, and cultural relevance still determine whether a message travels or stalls.
When brands design content people are proud to pass along, they earn a place in the conversation — not just a moment of attention.
Fortune Favors the Prepared
The Super Bowl rewards skill, speed, and strategic agility, but it exposes a lack of preparation just as quickly.
In the rush to be relevant, many brands confuse real-time marketing with improvisation. The result is content that feels disconnected, opportunistic, or misaligned with the brand’s larger narrative. When that happens, speed becomes a liability rather than an advantage.
The brands that succeed in real time approach the moment differently. They know their message, their boundaries, and their role in the cultural conversation before kickoff. They have already made the strategic decisions that matter, which allows them to move quickly without losing coherence.
AI plays a meaningful role here, but not the one many assume. It does not decide what a brand should say. It amplifies how efficiently a brand can say what it already knows. When strategy is clear, AI accelerates execution. When strategy is unclear, it simply accelerates noise.
The best real-time moments feel effortless because they are prepared. They connect back to the core idea introduced in the commercial and extend it in ways that feel timely rather than reactive.
The Strategic Playbook Behind the Brands That Win
The brands that consistently succeed during the Super Bowl are not guessing. They are operating from a fundamentally different understanding of how attention behaves once it is earned.
They do not treat the commercial as the objective. They treat it as the ignition point.
The first difference is expectation. The strongest brands assume that attention will trigger action. They expect audiences to search, to share, to react, and to look for meaning. As a result, they plan deliberately for what happens next instead of hoping interest will linger on its own.
The second difference is connection. Winning brands design their campaigns as connected systems, not isolated assets. The story introduced in the commercial carries through to search experiences, social content, and follow-up messaging. Each touchpoint reinforces the same core idea, adjusted for context rather than reinvented for the channel.
Third, they design for behavior, not impressions. Metrics like reach and views matter, but they are not mistaken for impact. The focus is on whether people know where to go next, what to do next, and why it matters to them. Attention is treated as a starting condition, not a success metric.
Preparation is another defining factor. The best Super Bowl brands make strategic decisions early (i.e., what they will respond to, what they will ignore, and how far they are willing to stretch in real time). That preparation allows them to move quickly without losing coherence or credibility.
AI has widened the gap here. For prepared teams, it accelerates execution and consistency. For unprepared teams, it magnifies fragmentation. The technology does not create advantage on its own; it rewards clarity.
Ultimately, the difference is not budget, celebrity access, or production value. It is intent. The brands that win design experiences around how people actually behave, ensuring that every moment of attention has somewhere productive to go.
Applying Super Bowl Thinking to Everyday Marketing
For most brands, buying a Super Bowl ad is unrealistic. That reality is often used as a reason to dismiss the lessons entirely.
It shouldn’t be.
While the scale is obviously different, the underlying dynamics are the same. Most marketing efforts still create moments of attention. A product launch, a major announcement, a thought leadership post, or even a well-timed social update all introduce the same question into the audience’s mind: What is this, and why should I care?
What separates effective marketing from forgettable noise is not the size of the moment, but what happens next.
The brands that apply Super Bowl thinking to everyday marketing design for the full journey. They anticipate curiosity and ensure that useful, relevant content is ready when people go looking for more. They connect ideas across channels so the experience feels intentional rather than fragmented.
This does not require more content. It requires better coordination. Attention without direction fades quickly. Attention with a clear path compounds.
When teams plan for behavior — search, sharing, and follow-up — even modest moments become meaningful. The same principles that apply on the biggest stage in advertising apply just as powerfully in everyday marketing efforts.
The opportunity is not to act bigger than you are. It is to act more prepared than your audience expects.
Final Thoughts
The Super Bowl makes attention visible, but it does not change how attention works.
Attention creates curiosity. Curiosity creates intent. What happens next is determined by the content and experiences that surround the moment. A great commercial can open the door, but it cannot decide what people do after they walk through it.
The brands that consistently win understand this. They do not chase moments for their own sake. They design for what follows — anticipating behavior, preparing content, and connecting experiences so attention has somewhere productive to go.
This is not a Super Bowl-specific insight. It is a modern marketing one. In a landscape where attention is fragmented and fleeting, value is created by those who plan for the full journey, not just the first impression.
Beyond the commercials, that is where the real work happens. And for brands willing to design for what comes next, it is also where lasting impact is made.
The question for modern marketers isn’t how to win attention, but how prepared they are for what comes next. When you’re ready to bring your brand to the surface, The Underground Group is here to partner with you.
FAQs
How do brands measure success beyond views and impressions during moments like the Super Bowl?
While reach and impressions indicate exposure, they rarely capture impact. More meaningful signals include search behavior, time spent with follow-up content, sharing patterns, and how audiences move between touchpoints after initial exposure. These behaviors reveal whether attention turned into engagement and intent, rather than simply passing by.
What role does organizational structure play in a brand’s ability to capitalize on attention?
Organizational structure plays a significant role. Teams that operate in silos often struggle to connect commercials, social content, and follow-up experiences quickly and coherently. Brands that perform best during high-attention moments tend to align strategy, content, and execution early, enabling faster decision-making without sacrificing consistency.
How has AI changed the way brands should approach moments like the Super Bowl?
AI has dramatically increased the speed and volume at which content can be created and distributed, but it hasn’t changed audience behavior. People still look for relevance, clarity, and meaning. In that sense, AI doesn’t replace strategy — it amplifies it. Prepared teams use AI to move faster and stay aligned. Unprepared teams use it to produce more noise.
Can smaller brands apply these lessons without a Super Bowl-sized budget?
Absolutely. The principles outlined here are not about scale, but design. Any moment that earns attention (e.g., a campaign launch, a product announcement, a strong piece of content) creates the same opportunity. Brands that anticipate curiosity and prepare useful, connected follow-up content can turn even modest moments into lasting impact.
The Super Bowl is a registered trademark of the National Football League. This article is for editorial and educational purposes only and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NFL.