Beyond the Game: How the Super Bowl Shapes Advertising, Streaming, and Culture
"The SuperBowl is like the marketing girlies' SuperBowl"
Every February, the Super Bowl isn’t just about football—it’s America’s biggest pop-culture moment. Between record-breaking viewership, high-stakes ads, and the halftime spectacle, it’s the one night when brands, celebrities, and entertainment collide.
Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest TV-watching night in the American calendar, reaching 126 million viewers in 2025- a new record for the NFL! The 2024 game was the second most-watched television event in history1, attracting a total of 123.7 million viewers.2
While most viewers tune in for a good game of football3, according to a 2024 survey, 18% of watchers claimed to watch the broadcast mainly for the ads!4 A well-done SB ad does not just drive sales but makes your brand the topic of conversation, for a month after the big game Super Bowl advertisers saw a 16% increase in total word of mouth, both online and offline.5 However, this high level of engagement is NOT cheap, in 2025 an average 30-second ad spot costs brands around $8 million. This price tag has only gotten more expensive through the years, in 2020 it stood at $5.6 million, but as viewership increases, the cost of advertising also increases.
So are these ads worth it?
Well, according to Kantar research, the 2021 Super Bowl ads delivered an average return on investment of $4.60 per dollar spent, with many brands in the double digits.6
It’s almost like the game (football) was made for these ad breaks, with stoppage time allowing for 18 ad breaks across the 3.5 hour broadcast.
Celebrity appearances in ads are extremely common and used to be celebrated and awaited by viewers, but in 2024 the net sentiment about celebrities in these ads took a nose dive reaching -33%. Interestingly, people faced ‘celebrity fatigue’- the lowest sentiment ads had 3 celebrities while the highest sentiment ads had only 1.7 In 2025, marketers learned from their mistake and while a majority of the ads (66.7%) had celebrities, they kept it to 1-2.
FOX’s Bold Bet:
Tubi is a free, ad-supported streaming service owned by the Fox Corporation. The 2025 Super Bowl was available for FREE to anyone who signed up to Tubi with their email address. In Jan 2025, they reported having 97 million monthly active users.
As of Q3 2024, 80.7 million households in America did not have cable8, this allowed Tubi to step in and be their Super Bowl Sunday hero by allowing them to watch the most anticipated game of the year for free, and in 4K.
Prior to this year’s Super Bowl, Fox has been pushing Tubi TV via innovative and memorable ads like the 2023 Superbowl Interface Interruption. Tubi currently has an extensive 250,000 movies and TV show eps in their library, which is eight times larger than Netflix’s US library.
According to Fox’s post on X, Tubi brought in 13.6 million viewers, which is the highest streaming service viewership in Super Bowl history.
As I stated in my first-ever post on Substack, ‘Streaming services can leverage their advertising spots at higher rates as sports bring 1. high viewership, 2. immediate engagement 3. regular content’.
High viewership: The Super Bowl consistently outdoes its own record each year for the highest viewed broadcast.
Immediate engagement: No one is watching the Super Bowl after the winner is announced.
regular content: While the Super Bowl is huge, there is a whole season of matches that lead up to it. All U.S. streaming platforms that hold NFL rights saw an average growth in monthly active viewers of 14% between Q3 2023 and Q1 2024, compared to 10% growth across SVoD platforms as a whole.9
Cord cutting is the only main threat to the Super Bowl’s viewership, Gen-Z finds paying ~$70+ per month on a cable provider unnecessary- 65% of GenZ does not own cable TV10. Streaming the Super Bowl on Tubi made it so accessible, that even Gen-Z put it on as their secondary (or even third ) screen. It lead to the mentality of why not be a part of a live pop-culture moment that will take over my social media for the next 2-3 days 🤷🏽♀️.
This mentality is what Fox used as leverage when pricing their ad spots, they banked on Tubi’s accessibility and ease to increase viewership and make the ads worth more.
There is one major way the Super Bowl can constantly keep upping its viewership- The Half Time Show!
Each year an iconic singer transforms the pitch into their personal concert stadium in the middle of the biggest match of the year and gives America their best performance. This year, Fox reported a total viewership of 135.7 million viewers during the half-time show featuring Pulitzer prize-winning rapper, Kendrick Lamar.11
Kendrick brought out guests like SZA, DJ Mustard, Samuel L. Jackson, and Serena Williams. Fresh off his recent Grammys sweep for his hit song (/diss track to Drake) ‘Not Like Us’.
The halftime show brings in an audience that would not necessarily tune into the Super Bowl for the game, it is the reason why the Super Bowl is not just a huge day for sports but a huge day for entertainment and television. It’s a badge of honor for stars to have their own Superbowl halftime show as they go down in US pop-culture history. Kendrick’s performance, production, and political messaging made the show captivating (better than last year’s performance IMO), but what really stole the show were his bootcut jeans! The $1,300 Celine Jeans are now completely out of stock on the company’s page.
With all of America’s eyes on you and 8 million dollars spent- as a brand, you really can’t miss the mark!
The expectation of brands is set so high that one bad ad could ruin your brand’s perception for years to come. This year, trendy health and wellness brand, Hims and Hers, alienated their target audience by emphasizing America's obesity problem and then framing their product as the solution when it continues to worsen the issue.
The Super Bowl isn’t just a game—it’s a high-stakes, high-impact pop culture moment where brands gamble big, celebrities play supporting roles, and streaming platforms fight for dominance. Whether it’s Tubi shaking up the TV landscape or brands carefully rethinking their ad strategies, the event continues to evolve with changing media habits. I am excited to see how the media landscape will look by the time the 2026 games come around.
PS: I would love to know which ads you loved, which you remember, and which you absolutely hated in the comments! If you have 2026 half-time performance predictions, tell me that also!!!
behind the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing
https://www.emarketer.com/content/super-bowl-deliver-on-ratings--ads--streaming
For this post whenever I say football I mean American football. In every other moment of life when I say football I mean FOOTBALL ⚽️
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290552/people-watching-super-bowl-for-ads/#:~:text=According%20to%20an%20October%202024,in%20order%20to%20watch%20ads.
https://prospect.org/culture/2024-08-06-broken-cords-cable-tv/#:~:text=AS%20RECENTLY%20AS%20TEN%20YEARS,first%20time%20in%20television%20history.
https://deadline.com/2024/04/super-bowl-streaming-services-paramount-plus-peacock-1235885676/
https://www.alistdaily.com/technology/cordless-and-connected-65-percent-of-gen-z-are-cord-cutters/
https://www.billboard.com/culture/tv-film/super-bowl-lix-scores-ratings-record-second-year-row-1235898290/
LOVED the Novartis breast cancer commercial
Fabb. Reading culture shauk is my Super Bowl