Your Pre-Game Guide to Super Bowl LX
Source: NBCU/NFL
Super Bowl LX kicks off Sunday, Feb. 8, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. If recent viewership trends hold up, as many as 130 million people in the U.S. alone will be tuning in to see the NFL’s championship game.
Last year’s Super Bowl LIX, between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, pulled in 127.7 million viewers across FOX, Tubi, FOX Deportes, Telemundo and all streaming properties, a new record total audience for the Super Bowl.
The modern Super Bowl is not only the No. 1 televised event of the year in the U.S. If it breaks the previous year’s record, it becomes the most watched event ever. In fact, the Top 10 most viewed TV programs of all time in the U.S. are now Super Bowls.
This obviously makes it a major event — if not the major event — for advertisers who are living in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape. Even other massive sporting events — which are typically spread out over multiple games — don’t deliver that one-time jolt that the Super Bowl does.
And viewers are specifically tuning in to see the ads. According to a Kantar study, 91% of viewers in the U.S. think the ads are a big part of the game. A study conducted by GFK and FOX ahead of last year’s game found that 56% of viewers state that after seeing an ad in the Super Bowl, they seek it out to watch it again.
Beyond numbers, there’s also the matter of reputation. Depending on your category and target audience, Super Bowl ads can indicate to consumers, the stock market, or board members, that you’re a serious contender with deep pockets. Kantar also found that, on average, one Super Bowl ad is 20 times more effective than a regular TV ad at driving brand perceptions.
For smart marketers, the ad itself is simply part of a much larger omnichannel machine that can include everything from social to out-of-home. The Super Bowl ad can launch a product or campaign. Or it can be the culmination of a campaign. (Check out: WPP’s What Super Bowl LX Teaches Brands About Integration, Attention, and Relevance.)
How to watch
In the U.S., the game will be carried by NBCU on NBC and Peacock. Spanish-language coverage in the U.S. will be carried by Telemundo, which is promising “its most extensive Super Bowl coverage ever” across Telemundo, Universo, Peacock, Telemundo Deportes Ahora, and digital and social platforms.
Spots this year are running approximately $8 million for 30 seconds of ad time, but due to demand — NBCU announced it had sold out inventory in September of last year — NBCU reportedly sold a few for as much as $10 million. There are always changes up to the week of the game as inventory shifts or marketers pull out of the game.
Most of the ads shown on Peacock will be the same as those running on linear broadcast but there will be a handful of national streaming-only buys and Peacock will offer a limited set of local ad breaks.
The Big Game won’t be just an ecosystem play for marketers building out around the game. The Super Bowl is part of something NBCU is calling “Legendary February.” Coverage of the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics begins on Friday, Feb. 6 on NBCU properties and lasts for two weeks. One week after the Super Bowl, NBC will be carrying the NBA All-Star Game. NBCU has been offering cross-platform, cross-sport packages for marketers for the 17-day event. And while most other networks use the Super Bowl to lead into important programming — a debut scripted sitcom or the season premiere of a gameshow — NBC is transitioning directly from the Super Bowl to prime-time Olympics coverage.
What to watch for
A light touch: While there will be a couple of issue ads and likely one or two that tug at the heartstrings, the general rule of Super Bowl is the more tense the atmosphere in the country, the lighter the tone. In an AdAge/Harris Poll of 1,000 consumers ahead of the game, “71% of said they most want to see funny ads, while 46% said that they are most likely to remember a funny ad. Brands are listening — funny spots comprised 70% of Big Game ads in the last three years, according to iSpot.”
Celebrities: Celebrities might be expensive, but they tend to be a safe bet. In the campaigns made public so far, we’ve counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 celebrities.
Artificial Intelligence: Ads for AI services and AI-enabled products didn’t exactly land with viewers last year, but companies will be back at it again this year, with Anthropic’s Claude throwing punches directly at the competition. And first-time advertiser Svedka is running what it says is the first AI-crafted Super Bowl ad ever.
The halftime show: This one is a bit of a wildcard. Last year, viewership among 18-49-year-old viewers peaked during Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance, but older demographics fell off some. This year’s halftime show stars Bad Bunny, one of the world’s top-selling artists who is coming off a fresh round of Grammy wins. Counter-programming for the halftime show has been announced, but Super Bowl counter-programming has historically been an exercise in futility. In fact, HBO this year moved new episodes of “Industry” and “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” up to Friday to avoid going up against the game.
Overtime: There have only been two overtime games in Super Bowl history, one of them two years ago. In the past, broadcasters have held live auctions for overtime ad units. But this year, NBCU is planning ahead. Mark Marshall, Chairman, Global Advertising and Partnerships at NBCUniversal, told ADWEEK: “We already have conversations with advertisers, so if it happens, we actually have the game plan lined up already. I’m too nervous to sit there and not have a game plan in case overtime happens. And there have been so many events, so many close games in these playoffs, that I don’t think overtime is out of the question for this one.”