What marketing decisions are behind the making of Super Bowl ads?

In February, during Super Bowl LVIII, the athleisure company Vuori released a 30-second advertisement called "A New Perspective on Performance Apparel." It featured active and diverse young adults exercising, surfing, and playing volleyball against the backdrop of California's mountains and coastline, with the company's logo eventually overlaid on a sunset.

Over the previous couple of years, the fast-growing brand has been opening more stores and highlighting its eclectic collection of products in various commercials. But this TV spot was different. As Vuori founder Joe Kudla told Modern Retail, the ad was "a visual reinforcement that we are in fact inspired by this active aspirational coastal California lifestyle that we live every day."

In other words, the primary purpose of a multimillion-dollar ad wasn't necessarily to sell anything. It was to build on its brand and draw traffic to its website.

It's a modern strategy for a multichannel audience. It wasn't too long ago that companies strategized a chunk of their marketing budgets around the 30-second Super Bowl commercial. However, as the digital landscape has continued to outgrow linear media, more companies have begun leaning into online channels—websites, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok—to connect and engage with their customers.

Collabstr explored some marketing decisions that go into Super Bowl ads, from earned media tactics to star power and teasers.

And with today's Super Bowl ads receiving the type of hype reserved for movie premieres, complete with trailers and widely shared trailers, the 30-second commercial is just one part of a brand's larger, drawn-out ad campaign, using and repurposing its big-game content before and after the middle of February. 

The big investment before the big game

Before brands drop millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads, they may spend months determining how well a campaign will fare. Using surveys, testing, and briefings, brands learn whether different types of ads will be attractive to viewers. Then they share outcomes with investors to explain their willingness to spend big on a creative idea.

Once they get some general baseline numbers, marketers check a wide range of key performance indicators such as brand awareness and perception, earned and owned social impressions, and tangible sales. That way, they can compare the difference before and after the game.

"You outline [the core brand metrics] early on, and then you set benchmarks against that," José Aniceto, SVP and head of behavioral sciences at MullenLowe U.S., told Marketing Brew. "And if you're a brand that can afford to even be in the Super Bowl, you probably have a framework you can measure against."

"Afford" is a relative term when it comes to big-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 seeking 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 virtually sold out its ad inventory three months before the last Super Bowl, highlighting live sports' critical role in media.

To get the most bang for their buck, brands leverage what works

The most effective Super Bowl ads put a fresh spin on tried-and-true strategies. Star power, for example, never gets old. High-profile hires add credibility and amplify an ad's reach, but they're not effective unless there's an organic connection between the celebrity and the product they're peddling.

Consider the 2024 Dunkin Donuts ad starring Ben Affleck, the Boston-bred actor often spotted with the brand's coffee around town—sometimes by the armload. Leveraging Affleck's everyman image, the coffee chain cast him as a drive-thru window cashier—and it paid off. The spot produced thousands of online articles after the game and had a potential reach of 1.2 billion viewers, according to DECisionOne insights.

The spot also capitalized on the inherent humor of the situation, another element of advertising 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 juxtapositions to get laughs—and attention—from viewers.

Even when ads create buzz, measuring their impact on sales and brand recognition is different. In 2014, Bank of America paid for a Super Bowl spot that requested contributions for RED, a nonprofit co-founded by U2 frontman Bono. After each download of a U2 single, the bank pledged a dollar to the nonprofit, which fights to end AIDS, raising $3 million total—and burnishing the bank's image. The dollar amount was a concrete metric, but a brand refresh is harder to measure.

Impact was gauged differently for Jimmy John's in 2021, when the sandwich company made a "Goodfellas" spoof ad and used online customer surveys before and after it aired to determine its reach. Though Jimmy John's Chief Marketing Officer Darin Dugan said he couldn't directly tie the ad buy with the company's improved awareness and sandwich sales, "it put us on the map," he told Marketing Brew.

Ultimately, various metrics gauge the success of Super Bowl ads. Long before YouTube, Super Bowl ads had the power to entice. Still, the digital landscape has allowed brands (and movie studios) to tease ads and trailers before kickoff, turn commercials into QR codes and springboards for websites, and use the middle of a game as one touchpoint in an "omnicampaign" targeting audiences across all their digital outlets.

Though they may not be sitting on the couch in front of a TV, people are still watching, in some form or other: Americans spend 4.5 to 5 hours a day watching live, time-shifted, and streaming TV and the same amount of time on other kinds of media, according to Nielsen's 2024-2025 Upfronts/NewFronts report. And that's good news for advertisers—and, in part, why the demand for a Super Bowl ad has only grown.

In August 2024, Variety reported that despite the big game being six months away, Fox had already "sold out all but a handful of slots of commercial inventory." It's another testament to the game's power. While the Super Bowl ad's nature, timing, and success keep changing, 30 seconds with your brand and product in front of the world remains too good an offer to pass up, no matter how you use it.

Story editing by Alizah Salario. Additional editing by Kelly Glass. Copy editing by Paris Close.