In February, during Super Bowl LVIII, sports company Vuori released a 30-second ad titled “A New Perspective on Performance Apparel.” It featured active and diverse young adults working out, surfing and playing volleyball against a backdrop of California’s mountains and coastline, with the company’s logo finally superimposed on the sunset.
In recent years, the fast-growing brand has been opening more stores and highlighting its diverse product portfolio in various advertisements. But this TV show was different. As Joe Kudla, founder of Vuori, told Modern Retail, the ad was “a visual reinforcement that we’re really inspired by this active California coastal lifestyle that we live every day.”
In other words, the main purpose of a multi-million dollar ad wasn’t necessarily to sell anything. It was supposed to build on its brand and drive traffic to its website.
It’s a modern trend for multi-channel audiences. It wasn’t that long ago that companies organized part of their marketing plans around the 30-second Super Bowl ad. However, as the digital landscape has continued to outgrow linear media, more businesses have begun to lean on online channels—websites, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok—to connect and engage with their customers.
Collabstr explored several marketing decisions that go into Super Bowl advertising, from earned media strategies to star power and teasers.
And since today’s Super Bowl ads get the kind of hype reserved for movie premieres, complete with trailers and widely shared trailers, the 30-second ad is just one part of a brand’s larger, long-running ad campaign, with the big ad campaign being used and reused . content of the game before and after mid-February.
The big investment for the big game
Before brands drop millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads, they may spend months determining how well a campaign will do. Using surveys, tests and briefings, brands learn whether different types of advertising will be attractive to their audience. Then they share the results with investors to explain their willingness to spend big on a creative idea.
Once they have some basic numbers, marketers check a variety of key performance indicators such as brand awareness and perception, earned and attributed social influence, and tangible sales. That way they can compare the difference before and after the game.
“You outline [the core brand metrics] early, and then you set a benchmark against it,” José Aniceto, head of behavioral science at MullenLowe US, told Marketing Brew. “And if you’re a brand that can afford to even be in the Super Bowl, you most likely have a framework that you can object.”
“Affordable” is a relative term when it comes to large ad spend. In consecutive years, the average cost of a 30-second Super Bowl spot has been $7 million, a far cry from the first Super Bowl in 1967, when ads cost $37,500 (or nearly $350,000 when adjusted for inflation). Expect more of the same in 2025: Fox is already looking to make at least that amount when the network hosts the Super Bowl again.
But brands must be nimble to compete for more than 120 million eyeballs. CBS nearly sold out of its ad inventory three months before the last Super Bowl, underscoring important live sports in the media.
To get the most bang for your buck, brands leverage what works
The most successful Super Bowl commercials put a new spin on tried-and-true tactics. Star power, for example, never gets old. High-profile hires increase credibility and increase the reach of an ad, but they are not effective unless there is an organic connection between the celebrity and the product they are selling.
Consider the 2024 Dunkin Donuts ad starring Ben Affleck, the Boston-born actor often spotted around town carrying the brand’s coffee — sometimes in his arm. The coffee chain used Affleck’s everyday persona and cast him as a cashier through the window – and it paid off. The site produced thousands of articles online after the game, potentially reaching 1.2 billion viewers, according to DECisionOne Insights.
The spot also capitalized on the inherent humor of the situation, another factor in the ad’s success. Like actor-comedian Will Ferrell driving through scenes from “Bridgerton” and “Stranger Things” in electric vehicles for a General Motors spot, brands often use unexpected analogies to get laughs — and attention — from audiences.
Even when ads create buzz, measuring their impact on sales and brand awareness is different. In 2014, Bank of America paid for a Super Bowl spot that solicited donations for RED, a nonprofit founded by U2 frontman Bono. After every download of a U2 single, the bank pledged a dollar to the non-profit organization fighting to end AIDS, raising a total of $3 million – and denting the bank’s image. The dollar amount was a tangible metric, but brand renewal is harder to measure.
Impact was measured differently for Jimmy John’s in 2021, when the sandwich company made a “Goodfellas” caricature ad and used online surveys of customers before and after it aired to determine its reach. While Jimmy John’s chief marketing officer Darin Dugan said he couldn’t directly link the ad buy to increased company awareness and sandwich sales, “it puts us on the map,” he told Marketing Brew.
Finally, various metrics measure the success of a Super Bowl ad. Long before YouTube, Super Bowl ads had the power to seduce. However, the digital landscape has allowed brands (and studios) to tease pre-launch ads and trailers, turn ads into QR codes and website springboards, and use the mid-game as a single touch point in a “public campaign” that targets audiences across all their digital outlets. .
While they may not be sitting on the couch in front of the TV, people are still watching, in some form: Americans spend 4.5 to 5 hours a day watching live, time-shifted, and streaming TV and the same amount of time on other forms of media , according to Nielsen’s 2024-2025 Upfronts/NewFronts report. And that’s good news for advertisers — and part of why the demand for Super Bowl advertising has only grown.
In August 2024, Variety reported that despite the blockbuster being six months away, Fox had already “sold out all but a handful of retail inventory.” It’s yet another testament to the power of the game. While the nature, timing and effectiveness of Super Bowl advertising continues to change, 30 seconds of your brand and product in front of the world is still too good a deal to pass up, no matter how you use it.
Story editing by Alizah Salario. Additional editing by Kelly Glass. Copy editing of Paris Close.
This story originally appeared on Collabstr and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
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