The Super Bowl captures mass attention, making it a powerful marketing opportunity for all brands, not just consumer ones. By incorporating relevant themes, even "boring" B2B companies can significantly boost engagement because the topic is top-of-mind for their audience.

Over 60% of Super Bowl ads used celebrities, but most failed to deliver ROI. The few successes, like Ben Affleck for Dunkin', worked because the connection was sincere and pre-existing. Simply paying for fame without a genuine link is a waste of money.

The Super Bowl is most effective for brands facing a fundamental awareness problem—when the mass market simply doesn't know a product, feature, or solution exists. The platform's massive reach is ideal for closing this knowledge gap at scale.

Anthropic's Super Bowl ad was a massive success within the niche, terminally-online tech community on X (Twitter), but it completely failed with the general public. This demonstrates how hyper-targeted messaging can create a barbell outcome on a mass media stage, excelling with one audience while alienating another, ultimately ranking in the bottom 3% of all Super Bowl ads.

Super Bowl advertising serves two distinct strategic purposes. For new or unknown companies, the goal is to achieve massive, instant brand awareness. For established, well-known brands like Raisin Bran, the ad serves to re-engage consumers and regain top-of-mind relevance in a crowded market.

The most common mistake in Super Bowl advertising isn't a poor creative concept, but a failure to connect that concept to a tangible business outcome. An entertaining ad fails if it doesn't reinforce the brand promise or drive purchase intent, often due to insufficient brand visibility within the spot itself.

The Super Bowl is a massive cultural moment. Even 'boring' B2B marketers can capitalize on this by incorporating relevant themes and language into their campaigns, regardless of industry. This taps into audience top-of-mind awareness and can lead to a significant lift in engagement.

Zappi's methodology measures Super Bowl ads not just on likability, but on a "Sales Impact Score" benchmarked against a curated norm of the prior year's best-performing TV ads. This high bar of comparing against the "best of the best" separates merely entertaining ads from those that drive real business results.

Pharma brands like Wegovy and Hims & Hers achieved top sales impact scores by moving beyond product features. They successfully navigated consumer distrust by connecting their solutions to broader, emotionally resonant social issues, such as healthcare inequality, striking a powerful and effective chord with viewers.