Next Sunday’s Super Bowl will not only be a showdown of the two best teams in professional football, it will be the annual showcase for the best in advertising, as brands seek to outdo each other in what has long been the most prized real estate in all of advertising.
But with Super Bowl spots now costing an eye-popping $7 million (at least) for just 30 seconds of airtime, and with ad tech allowing brands to spend their ad budgets more efficiently than ever, an existential question hangs over the broadcast: Is a Super Bowl commercial still worth it?
The answer depends on who you ask.
“If you view a Super Bowl spot as just a commercial, there is no way it’s worth it,” says Mike Margolin, director of Institute of Advanced Advertising Studies at the industry trade group The 4As. “It has to be so much bigger than those 30 seconds.”
Margolin would know; he worked on several Super Bowl commercials during his 24-year tenure at creative agency RPA. Seven million dollars for 30 seconds of airtime is hard to justify on its own, he says, but a Super Bowl buy can be worth the price if it’s the foundation for a larger, cross-platform marketing campaign, or long-term brand-building effort.
Brands need to have a “before, during and after” strategy if they want to succeed with their Super Bowl ad, Margolin advises. They should tease the ad in the run-up to the game, they should have second-screen activations on social media and with influencers while the ad runs, and they should re-engage viewers online in the weeks and months after the ad has run.
Margolin points to Intuit’s wildly successful “Small Business, Big Game” campaign leading up to the 2014 Super Bowl, which Margolin helped conceive and execute as RPA’s SVP of audience strategy. The campaign involved the financial software provider awarding its Super Bowl spot to a small business as part of a months-long online competition, and it generated 13 billion earned media impressions, Margolin tells The Outcome.
Still, it's hard to measure the bottom-line impact of a Super Bowl ad, especially when other advertising channels are much more measurable in terms of their effect on sales. Commerce overtook TV in 2025 as the largest advertising channel in terms of ad spend, according to advertising giant WPP, and commerce is expected to only widen its lead in the forthcoming year — a shift driven by it being easier to measure whether commerce ads led to increased sales.
It’s a remarkable inflection point, especially considering that live sports is one of the last vestiges of appointment TV viewing.
A Super Bowl ad is “one of the most over-romanticized media investments out there,” says Rachel Dillon, EVP of sales at Strategus, a media agency specializing in connected TV.
“On gameday, there are only a limited number of national ad pods and roughly a few dozen premium placements, which means brands are fighting for attention in extremely crowded moments,” Dillon explains. “Add that to the fact Super Bowl ads no longer debut during the game — most are released early on YouTube and amplified across social — and the ‘you had to be there’ moment is gone. For most brands, that makes the massive price tage hard to justify.”
Brands are better off using the Super Bowl as a “halo,” Dillon says, buying ad space before and after the game, and retargeting post-game while interest in the brand is still high. For most brands, that makes the massive price tag hard to justify.”
Dillon has a point; few Super Bowl ads the past several years have managed to create the kind of lasting impact that a brand hopes for when advertising during the game. Margolin agrees, saying that brands have come to over-rely on celebrity endorsements in their Super Bowl spots instead of coming up with a novel concept.
The brands themselves certainly seem to think a Super Bowl ad is still a good investment, though — NBCUniversal sold out its Super Bowl inventory in September, before the NFL season even started.
Jason Fairchild, CEO of CTV advertising platform tvScientific, clarifies that brands can measure the sales performance of a Super Bowl, but that doing so requires “a longer-term lift analysis across all channels” versus measuring if the ad drove interest immediately after hitting the air.
Whether a Super Bowl ad is worth it is ultimately a question of if TV advertising still has the power to build long-term brand equity. As ad tech has become more sophisticated and better able to connect ads to purchase behavior, some feel that brands are over-focused on short-term direct response advertising at the expense of building a strong, lasting brand image.
“If you are a serious marketer dealing with an established brand, you know you have to improve people’s perceptions of your brand to make it easier to sell and increase your margin,” Margolin says. “If you're strictly [return on ad spend] focused, you’re missing all of these things that happen before a consumer makes a purchase decision.”
