Tag: Super Bowl LX

Super Bowl 2026 Ads: By Ad Recall

It’s been two weeks since the Super Bowl, but the most important data from advertising’s biggest night lands now, after the noise has died and the industry has moved on to arguing about something else. Ipsos recall data shows that long-running campaigns outperform bespoke event ads by embarrassing margins.

The only Super Bowl signal that survives Monday

Every year, the game becomes a weeklong festival of hot takes, rankings, and creative commentary. The game itself produces a clear winner, but in the industry we speak too generally about Super Bowl advertising as if it’s all the same. It isn’t.

That’s the problem. We talk about “Super Bowl advertising” as a category, when the night produces winners and losers in advertising too.

How Ipsos turns hype into a memory test

Ipsos tracked spontaneous brand recall among Super Bowl viewers, the simplest and most demanding test in advertising. Viewers were asked which brands they remembered seeing advertised during the game, with no prompts. Ipsos measured it the next morning, and again a week later.

Spontaneous recall is unaided naming. If people cannot name you without a list in front of them, you were entertainment, not advertising.

In global FMCG and retail portfolios, tentpole moments are recurring, so the only scalable advantage is a set of distinctive brand cues that work across every channel.

The real question is whether your Super Bowl spot is building durable brand memory or renting a one-night reaction.

The winners did not act like it was a one-night event

Budweiser

Budweiser dominated the night on recall. Its “American Icons” spot, a foal and a newly hatched bald eagle growing up together over the years to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”, achieved spontaneous recall of nearly twenty million viewers the morning after the game.

A week later, that number had climbed to twenty three million. Perhaps a signature of a campaign that made it into actual memory rather than mere social feeds.

Pepsi

Pepsi came second, 12 million viewers still able to recall the brand the next day. Their polar bear blind taste test, Coca-Cola’s own mascot choosing Pepsi over Coke, landed because it was built on decades of competitive positioning and the oldest tactic from the cola wars: the challenge.

Dunkin

Dunkin finished third at 11 million. Ben Affleck’s star spangled sitcom parody is exactly what good advertising should be: emotionally engaging, distinctively coded, impossible to misattribute.

These three brands make a compelling case that Super Bowl advertising can work. Spend well, follow your strategy, and put your name into millions of minds and leave it there for a week. Factor in a hundred million viewers, the additional coverage, social amplification, and the required $8 million investment looks seriously worth it, particularly in the fragmented, chaotic media landscape we now inhabit.

The expensive part is not the media. It is the forgettability

The uncomfortable half of the Ipsos results is how many brands barely cleared the minimum bar. More than half the brands in the Ipsos data gained less than a percentage point of recall the morning after their ad ran. Each spent what most companies deploy as an entire year’s marketing budget. Each one has very little to show for it.

Ring

Ring managed 26th place with less than one million viewers recalling the brand the next day, roughly a twentieth of Budweiser’s number. Recall picked up later, likely driven by the outcry around the AI narrative in the spot.

Michelob Ultra

Michelob Ultra came 44th out of 45 brands after running a glossy, star studded spot featuring Kurt Russell, Chloe Kim, and T.J. Oshie. It cost a packet to produce, north of $8 million to air, and was instantly forgotten by almost every viewer of the big game. While recall improved a week later, that was most likely “ghost recall” from other spend rather than the Super Bowl moment itself. By “ghost recall,” I mean recall created by other media exposures that gets wrongly attributed to the Super Bowl airing.

It’s perhaps unfair to single out two brands when almost two thirds of those advertising during the Super Bowl failed so miserably to reach even the lowest bar in the persuasion hierarchy.

Why “familiar” beats “fresh” in 30 seconds

So what separates the winners from the losers? It’s mostly a story of consistency. Ring and Michelob Ultra made special Super Bowl ads. Budweiser and Pepsi didn’t. They extended long running brand codes into the Super Bowl opportunity. It’s not a small distinction.

Extractable takeaway: If your Super Bowl idea does not extend an existing set of brand cues, assume you are buying applause, not memory.

This was the 48th time the Budweiser Clydesdales appeared during the game. Clydesdales are large draft horses, and Budweiser has used them for decades as a signature brand cue in its advertising. Forty-eight years of the same visual assets and the same emotional territory. Think of it the other way: decades of ignoring hot agencies and ambitious new CMOs wanting to “put their stamp on things.” Either way, the sight of those horses trotting across a field now makes 20 million people think of one beer and one beer only.

“Distinctive assets” are repeatable cues, characters, music, visual codes, and phrases that people reliably link to a specific brand. When those cues repeat, viewers identify the brand faster and more accurately, which increases the chance the story is stored as brand memory rather than background entertainment.

Business intent. Buy memory, not applause

Most marketers know patience wins. But very few act on it, because patience is not rewarded in quarterly business cycles and it certainly won’t win many industry awards.

Our industry is structurally biased toward newness. Marketers want to make new ads, and agencies, who get paid to create new work and nothing to run the old, aren’t incentivized to argue with them.

Some brands use the biggest advertising night of the year to launch something bespoke, something special, something that will live nowhere after the post game debate ends.

Budweiser used it to add one more chapter to something it started building long before today’s marketing teams rotated in. The Clydesdales are not a campaign. They are compound creativity, and compound creativity is what memory looks like.

Steal this from the recall winners

  • Keep the Super Bowl brief brutally narrow. Your first job is correct attribution, then entertainment.
  • Write an “asset continuity brief” before the creative brief. List the 3 to 5 cues you will not change.
  • If you make a one-off Super Bowl ad, brand it hard. New characters plus subtle branding is the fastest route to being forgotten.
  • Measure decay, not just peak. Next day recall is the entry ticket. Day 7 tells you whether you made memory.
  • Build for reuse. If the idea cannot live beyond one night, it is a very expensive dead end.

A few fast answers before you act

What is “spontaneous brand recall”?

Spontaneous brand recall is an unaided memory test. People are asked which brands they remember seeing advertised, without being shown options.

Why do long running campaigns usually win on recall?

Because repeated cues let viewers identify the brand quickly and correctly, which makes it more likely the story and brand get stored together in memory.

Does this mean you should never make a special Super Bowl ad?

No. Make the story special. Keep the brand cues consistent.

What is the fastest pre flight test before you approve the spot?

Ask neutral people: “Who is this for?” If they cannot name the brand quickly, the work is at risk.

What should you track besides recall?

Correct brand attribution, brand lift, search lift, and any downstream sales proxy you trust. Recall is the first gate, not the finish line.

T-Mobile ‘Tell Me Why’: The Live-Retail Play

A boy-band button in Times Square. And a very deliberate question

T-Mobile’s Super Bowl LX spot opens inside its Times Square Signature Store, surrounded by real customers, with a plain prompt on-screen: “Why is it better over here?” Then someone hits a big red button, the Backstreet Boys appear, and the “answer” arrives as a reimagined performance of I Want It That Way, with cameos from Druski, mgk (Machine Gun Kelly: Colson Baker) and Pierson Fodé. The commercial is credited to Panay Films and was slated to run as a :60 in the second quarter of the February 8, 2026 Big Game broadcast.

What matters is not the celebrity stack. It is the structural move: a telecom brand turning a comparison claim into a moment people can watch happening to other people.

How “Tell me why” turns a service claim into a stageable event

The core mechanic is simple on purpose. A single question frames the ad like a customer challenge, not a brand monologue. A physical trigger, the button, converts messaging into cause and effect. A live performance inside a real retail space supplies social proof because the audience is already there and reacting in-frame.

You can call this retail-as-stage. By retail-as-stage, I mean a physical store that functions as content set, event venue, and credibility engine at the same time.

When you turn a service comparison into a witnessed moment in a real store, with real reactions, belief shifts from “do I trust this claim?” to “I just saw why it’s true.”

The real question is how you make an invisible network promise feel provable in the moment, not just plausible in a chart.

The fastest path to belief is to turn an invisible network promise into a shared, watchable moment.

In telecom marketing, most value is felt after purchase, so “proof” has to be engineered before the contract is signed.

Why the nostalgia remix works, and why it is not just “a pop-culture hook”

Yes, it is familiar. But the stronger psychological play is fluency. A chorus people can finish in their head reduces processing effort, then that freed-up attention gets spent on the new lyric payload. The button adds perceived transparency. When a brand invites “why,” then stages an immediate “answer,” it signals it can withstand scrutiny.

Extractable takeaway: If your offering is hard to evaluate because it is invisible, abstract, or overloaded with fine print, stop trying to explain it better. Engineer a moment where the audience can watch someone else receive the answer in real time, because observed reactions become the credibility layer your claims cannot earn on their own.

Rewritten lyrics are inherently risky because they can feel like a jingle wearing a costume. This spot reduces that risk by grounding the musical in a real place, with real customers, and a visible trigger that creates a story arc worth retelling.

What T-Mobile is really trying to shift in 60 seconds

Look past the network line and you see a category-level repositioning attempt.

  • From coverage to a value stack. The ad frames the carrier choice as network plus bundled value plus experience, not just bars and price.
  • From switching pain to switching ease. The broader message is “make it easy to reconsider,” while the spot’s job is to create emotional permission to do so.
  • From brand assertion to customer interrogation. Opening with “why” signals the brand is answering scrutiny, which is a more credible posture in a high-skepticism category.

The Europe echo: making a network promise watchable

It should feel familiar. This “make connection visible” move has shown up before, by turning a network promise into a shared public moment you can actually witness.

Back in 2011, Deutsche Telekom executed a multi-city Christmas activation where Mariah Carey appeared as a hologram simultaneously across five European countries, with audiences linked across cities to experience the same performance at once.

The shared mechanic across both campaigns is consistent.

  • Make the promise tangible by creating a collective moment that can only exist because connection exists.
  • Use a universally recognizable song layer to synchronize emotion across audiences.
  • Build a reveal structure so the audience has a story arc worth retelling.

For the full Germany case, see Deutsche Telekom’s hologram Christmas surprise.

Steal the retail-as-stage pattern for “invisible products”

  • Start with a question the customer would actually ask. Not a tagline. A test.
  • Build one physical trigger. Buttons, switches, taps, scans. One action that says “watch this.”
  • Make the audience part of the evidence. Real reactions often land harder than any graphic.
  • Use music as memory infrastructure, not decoration. A familiar melody can carry new meaning fast.
  • Design for retellability. If it is easy to summarize, it is easier to spread.

A few fast answers before you act

What is the big idea behind “Tell Me Why” in one line?

It turns a telecom comparison claim into a witnessed moment in a real retail setting, using a familiar chorus and real-customer reactions to make “why” feel observed rather than asserted.

What is the core mechanic that makes it work?

A single customer-style question plus a physical trigger, the button, that immediately produces the “answer” as a performance, with the crowd reaction acting as the credibility layer.

Why does the Backstreet Boys remix outperform a normal benefits list?

Because audiences already encode the melody automatically. The rewritten chorus becomes a fast memory container for new information, and the live-style staging reduces skepticism.

What is the strategic intent beyond awareness?

To shift evaluation from “coverage and price” toward “network plus value plus experience,” and to lower switching resistance by making reconsideration feel emotionally safe.

What is the transferable lesson from the Deutsche Telekom hologram example?

If your product promise is invisible, create a synchronized public moment that can only exist because your promise exists, then let the shared reaction do the persuasion work.