What UK Advertisers Can Learn From The Super Bowl

This year, the cost of advertising during the Super Bowl has risen to as much as $10m for a 30-second slot. That’s a significant rise on recent years and is an indication of the value of live sport and the increasingly rare occasions when viewers are all tuned in at the same time.

Super Bowl LX, taking place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on Sunday 8 February, will be contested by the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks and be broadcast on both NBC and Peacock in the US. The Spanish language broadcast will be hosted by Telemundo. In the UK, it will be broadcast on Channel 5, Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports NFL.

And while the Big Game is the main attraction, almost as important is the halftime performance, which will this year feature Bad Bunny with an expected audience of more than 120 million viewers in the US alone.

As a result, advertisers continue to covet their space in the occasion. Brands such as Pepsi, Budweiser, Bug Light, Michelob, Hellmann’s (Unilever), GrubHub, Meta, Smirnoff, Pringles, Instacart and Ritz are among the many who are clamouring for the attention of sports fans.

Despite its rich heritage as a sport, American Football has only recently begun to rise in popularity across the UK, a deliberate strategy by the NFL to grow interest globally. However, naturally the size of audience will never reach that of US fandom.

Despite having many sporting occasions, the UK lacks its own version of the Super Bowl. But with live events such as the FIFA World Cup, Eurovision, and the Commonwealth Games on the horizon, are there still lessons for advertisers to learn from the big game over in the UK in how brands approach engaging audiences?

Sam Wise, CSO, Saatchi & Saatchi

There's something special about a one-off. Being at an event the world is watching, knowing you have to be there live with everyone else, knowing it will never happen again. Just like with the best athletes, these moments bring out the best in us creatively - the spectacle itself becomes a performance context that demands our best work.

In this country, we don't really trust ourselves to commercialise spectacle without cheapening it. We have a British hesitation about getting excited about our own events, and a lack of confidence that brands can ever be a welcome part of the peak moment itself.

When your starting point is "nobody cares, nobody remembers," then of course it makes sense to aim solely for consistency and memory structures built over time. That's what happens when you think that your most important lever is volume and repetition. It's what commercial opportunities around the Premier League have become - the world's most-watched league, treated as thirty-eight identical inventory opportunities.

The NFL went for structural scarcity with the Super Bowl and proves that via creativity, brands can be a welcome part of spectacle. Advertising sits alongside the halftime show and the game itself as one of three pillars - with massive global footprint.

Which just reminds us of a truth we all know: it's the things that don't happen often, that are most surprising or unusual, that really stand out. It’s worth remembering as an industry that scarcity creates conditions for creativity that consistency cannot, we just need the confidence to create the occasions, and rise to them.

James Leake, creative director, Droga5 London

The toughest competition on Super Bowl Sunday is not the one for yards and points. In 2025, 127 million people tuned in to watch Philly demolish Kansas City across four 15-minute quarters. Take out the stoppages however and America’s biggest sporting prize is won over just 16 minutes of actual game time. Much easier to come out on top compared to the 50 plus brands each competing for attention over 51 minutes on the biggest stage in advertising.

While the attention on the commercial break may be higher than at any other time, like the football, the game is the same. Millions will be spent on inoffensive, widely liked celebrities, dated cultural references and familiar jokes no one will remember by Monday  – the creative equivalent of running it up the middle and hoping things work out.

But like the iconic champions of the Big Game itself, the ads that live forever, the ones who will get talked about tomorrow, or remembered next year will be from brands brave enough to grasp the moment. They recognise the opportunity is there to be themselves, to do something different, to demand the spotlight.

The Super Bowl may be a once-a-year spectacle, but at its core, it’s the same game, and originality wins every time. Let’s go originality.

Alex Grieve, global CCO, BBH

There is a very clear lesson we should take from the Super Bowl and yet, year after year, despite us all knowing exactly what that lesson is and what needs to happen, we never seem able to actually do it. And the lesson, of course, is don't wait for the Super Bowl to do Super Bowl work. Last time I checked, human beings are open to creative, fresh, different work more than one day a year. I'm pretty sure that if we give them great work for the other 364 days of the year their heads won't explode. In fact, I'm guessing they'd probably like it. I know the Super Bowl has the money and the focus but it's also a mindset thing. As an industry we mobilise ourselves for a moment. The trick, the lesson, is not to limit ourselves to the Super Bowl moment but to take any moment and turn into our very own Super Bowl.

Jeffrey Spivock, EVP, integrated media strategy, Weber Shandwick

In today’s hyper-saturated media ecosystem, a Super Bowl ad is only a fraction of what it takes to break through. With more than 60 advertisers competing for attention, alongside the game itself, the halftime show, and endless second-screen distractions, brands can’t rely on a 30-second spot alone. The real impact comes from the choreography around the campaign. Success is about building a narrative arc that starts months before kickoff and continues long after the final whistle. That means consistent earned drumbeats: who you cast, how and when you tease, exclusive content drops, press strategy, and how the work lives on socially. Ads now need to inspire action and sharing, not just viewing.

One of the clearest examples is Pringles. Over multiple Super Bowls, the brand has treated the ad as the climax, not the starting point, using fan speculation, creator partnerships, and culture-led social moments to fuel anticipation. From playful internet teases around celebrity talent to TikTok-native activations and fandom-first storytelling, each campaign was designed to turn pop culture attention into sustained engagement and earned headlines well before the ad aired.

The lesson extends beyond one market or moment. While UK brands remain heavily committed to traditional TV, those that build a fully integrated ecosystem from the outset, rather than asking partners to “PR the ad” at the end, are far more likely to engage culture meaningfully and drive real business impact.

Jackson Byrne, creative director, Droga5 London

I made my first ad in high school. It was a campaign poster encouraging my classmates to vote for me in the student council election (many at the time were calling it the Super Bowl of student council elections).

All the other candidates aped classic political ads. The halls were filled with Microsoft Paint versions of pimply teenagers replacing Obama in his iconic HOPE poster. Photoshopped Uncle Sams with faint, pubescent moustaches pointed and declared “I Want Your Vote.” 

I was late getting my posters up, no surprise to my teachers, which gave me a great sense of the competitive landscape. Which is exactly like the Super Bowl.

No, seriously.

We can see the advertising environment of the Super Bowl very clearly. Every year, as an industry, we round up, rank and review the full slate of big game spots.

That should give us a really clear sense of the expectations people have when they see a Super Bowl commercial. 

That means our job is clear: How can our brand mess with those expectations? 

Because we can all agree that the best, most memorable work, at the Super Bowl and everywhere else, is unexpected. It delights and it surprises. It takes the expectations people have, and subverts them to make a deeper impact. 

So I know you’re wondering, what was my ingenious campaign poster? How did it brilliantly subvert my audience’s expectations?

Well, it was an action shot of me snowboarding with the headline: Vote for a Radical Dude!

I’m much better at advertising now (although I am still proud of that double entendre). 

The point is, I won the election. I knew my audience (high schoolers, let’s remember) and I knew what my competitors were doing. And knowing those things was enough to figure out how to be remembered in the booth.

What we do for brands is a bit more complicated, no doubt. It’s definitely way (way, way) more sophisticated. But maybe the basic ingredients, like attention, expectation, and competition, aren’t much different at all.