Original article published on the ANA website. 

Here’s the problem upfront: Maximising Super Bowl ROI.

Splashing out $8 million for 30 seconds is more beef than Drake has with Kendrick Lamar and I bet Hollywood agents can’t believe this celebrity payday juggernaut keeps rolling.

Meanwhile, audiences on social media grow every year, representing a cost-effective way to amplify that TV spot. Are they doing it effectively, though? Nope, the receiver is fumbling the pass.

For the second year, I watched all the Big Game TV spots and social supporting ads on TikTok and Instagram. That’s almost 800 ads from over 60 brands. Why? Because a brand’s effectiveness doesn’t live on one 30-second TV spot.

I’ve sacrificed both sleep and my social algorithms for you so huddle round for:

> A social media and effectiveness expert POV on good multi-platform strategy

> Some data on how effective brands were on social media.

We ran all these ads through our AI-powered content testing platform for data as well as opinion.

Science bit: DAIVID is an AI platform that helps marketers by predicting the effectiveness of their creative at scale. So, as well as analyzing the emotions generated by all the Big Game spots, we’ve also looked at the effectiveness of each campaign on brand and business metrics on TV and social.

Let’s kick off with strategy, shall we?

Ideas Over Assets

Last year, I was struck by how few campaign ideas had a wider execution as part of the Big Game ad. At Super Bowl 2024, just 10 out of 60-odd brands that advertised during the Big Game extended their campaign meaningfully into social. Did it improve this year? A bit. This year (in Barney’s highly scientific interesting-o-meter) 16 campaigns did something “interesting” beyond just cuts for social. That’s still less than 25 percent, though.

That being said, T-Mobile supported its Starlink mobile coverage ad with four influencers bouncing off to far-flung places, demonstrating a proof point for the Big Game ad. Cirkul used its slot to tee up a free giveaway of 100,000 starter kits. For a brand that needs to drive sampling to gain market share, this is neat as hell.

Also, Salesforce showed off the speed of its AI offering by getting a business influencer to make an AI agent during the half-time show. Finally, Poppi used some of its highly-followed social ambassadors for its TV spot, driving reach – and did a fun little collab with Tubi too.

Special mention to Nerdwallet (beluga whale social takeover rocks) and don’t think I didn’t notice it was based on a real meme. Also, respect the hustle of Dunkin, Ritz and Hexclad for pushing merch/product seen in the ad, a common practice in UK Christmas ads. I really want a tiny Hexclad pan.

Tease, Trend, Extend

If you spend a packet on celebs, the bare minimum you should do for social should be to plan the shoot, get additional content in the can and make nice edits for social, for before and after the game.

Bud Light did a great job with Post Malone and Shane Gillis’ obvious rapport for its cul-de-sac bros campaign. Meanwhile, Uber Eats extended the ‘conspiracy’ that the Super Bowl is just about making us eat with additional Matthew McConaughey and Martha Stewart content.

Warning From the Referee

I won’t name names, but three of the 60-odd Super Bowl brands posted nothing on social. Aside from the 16 who were on the interesting-o-meter and three no-shows, the remainder essentially just posted a version of their Big Game ad. Maybe with a teaser.

Who Got Your Attention?

OK, strategy aside, let’s get into the data. The elements of the DAIVID Creative Effectiveness Score are attention, positive emotions and brand recall. Not many ads get all these together.

The brands grabbing the highest attention scores in Instagram and TikTok were He Gets Us (23 percent above the norm), Nike (22.7 percent above the norm), and Turbotax (19.7 percent above the norm). God, sportswear and tax: a heady combo!

More so than TV, attention matters in social. He Gets Us and Nike had highly arresting imagery and wording that drove up their opening second attention scores. Notably, both scored higher attention scores in the final seconds than the start – people stayed for the whole thing. Looking at the data, there are also high positive emotion scores trending upwards through both, partly driven by the music: Led Zeppelin and Johnny Cash’s cover of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” doing some of the effectiveness heavy lifting.

Turbotax also made a suite of ancillary “for social” creative that adheres to attention-grabbing best practice.

Who Kicked Us in the TikToks?

Once ads have our attention, they need to get us in the feels. Taking out Nike and He Gets Us to focus on more social content, the most emotionally positive brands were Squarespace (48.6 percent feeling intense positive reaction), Salesforce (48.5 percent), and Lay’s (48.4 percent).

Squarespace’s smart edits made people laugh. Salesforce’s Big Game edits and its additional AI agent stunt were exciting and pacey, again suiting social. There were also a lot of warm feelings for that little Lay’s farmer and the edits around it.

Nice party. Whose was it again?

The final piece of the effectiveness puzzle is remembering the brand. In social, the highest-scoring brands for brand recall were Liquid Death (73.5 percent), OpenAI (71.4 percent), and MSC Cruises (71.2 percent).

Liquid Death had to be in here somewhere! Aside from the fuss about their ads, the can and brand are always visible. It’s unmissable. And while MSC Cruises might not win awards for creativity, we’re left with no doubt about who’s cruise it is. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is very well branded at the end and in the data; to me personally, it was clear the TV ad (their only social post for Super Bowl) held attention well (music playing a part) and evoked different emotions.

This contributed to its good brand recall.

Are we getting better at TV and social?

If this were a pep talk for a football team struggling through a season, I’d give them encouragement for improvement but make it clear that they had a long way to go.

Sub 25 percent of brands using this enormous platform to take an idea beyond a 30 second slot is still surprising. But compared to 2024, we’ve seen an increase in the use of the Big Game content over time to drive brand outcomes in social and improve ROI.

Let’s see who can take this home in ‘26.