Super Bowl Ads 2026: Which Brands Actually Made an Impact?

It’s been two weeks since Super Bowl 60, but the most telling data from advertising’s biggest night is only now becoming clear, after the initial flurry of reactions has subsided. The game itself produced a definitive winner on the field – the Seattle Seahawks over the New England Patriots – but in the advertising arena, a more nuanced picture is emerging.

Every year, the Super Bowl is inundated with instant analysis, rankings and creative commentary. However, this often obscures a critical point: the Super Bowl isn’t a monolithic advertising event. It produces winners and losers, and understanding which is which requires a more objective approach.

Ipsos’s recent research deserves particular attention. The firm tracked spontaneous brand recall among Super Bowl viewers – a simple, yet demanding, test of advertising effectiveness. They surveyed viewers the morning after the game and again a week later. The results offer a sobering assessment for many brands that invested heavily in 30- or 60-second spots.

Budweiser emerged as the clear victor. Its “American Icons” spot – depicting a foal and a newly-hatched bald eagle growing up together, set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’ – achieved spontaneous recall of nearly twenty million viewers the day after the game. Remarkably, that number increased to twenty-three million a week later, suggesting the ad resonated beyond fleeting social media buzz and entered actual memory.

Pepsi secured second place with 12 million viewers still recalling the brand the following day. Their polar bear blind taste test – featuring Coca-Cola’s mascot choosing Pepsi – leveraged decades of competitive positioning and a classic cola wars tactic: the challenge. Dunkin’ finished third at 11 million, with Ben Affleck’s sitcom parody proving emotionally engaging, distinctly branded, and easily attributable.

These three brands demonstrate that Super Bowl advertising can be effective. Strategic spending, adherence to a clear brand strategy, and the ability to imprint a message on millions of minds can justify the roughly $8 million investment, particularly in today’s fragmented media landscape.

However, the data also reveals a stark contrast. More than half the brands in the Ipsos data effectively saw their investment yield minimal returns, gaining less than a percentage point of recall a day after their ad aired. Each had spent what many companies allocate to an entire year’s marketing budget.

Ring landed in 26th place, with less than one million viewers recalling the brand the next day – a twentieth of Budweiser’s reach. While recall numbers improved in subsequent days, this was likely driven by negative reaction to the ad’s AI-focused narrative. Michelob Ultra fared even worse, ranking 44th out of 45 brands despite a glossy, star-studded spot featuring Kurt Russell, Chloe Kim, and T.J. Oshie. The ad cost millions to produce and air, yet was instantly forgotten by almost everyone who watched the game. Any subsequent recall increase a week later was likely attributable to broader advertising spend around the Olympics.

It’s perhaps unfair to single out Ring and Michelob Ultra when almost two-thirds of Super Bowl advertisers failed to achieve even the lowest benchmark for persuasion. However, their cases highlight a critical distinction.

Budweiser and Pepsi didn’t create special Super Bowl ads; they extended long-running campaigns into the Super Bowl opportunity. This is a crucial difference. This was the 48th time the Clydesdales had appeared in a Super Bowl ad, representing decades of consistent visual assets and emotional messaging. This consistency has created a powerful association: the sight of a horse now immediately evokes the Budweiser brand for 20 million people.

These long-running campaigns significantly outperform short, opportunistic ones – a finding supported by research from the IPA, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and System1. The longer a campaign runs, the more effective it becomes. The more distinctive the assets, the faster the brand registers in memory, bypassing analytical thought.

Many marketers are aware of this principle, but few act on it. Patience isn’t rewarded in quarterly business cycles, and it doesn’t win industry awards. The advertising industry is structurally biased toward novelty. Marketers want to create new ads, and agencies, compensated for new work rather than maintaining existing campaigns, have little incentive to challenge them.

Some brands used the Super Bowl to launch something bespoke, something special, something designed to exist only within the context of the game. Budweiser, however, added another chapter to a story it began building long before many current CMOs entered the field. The Clydesdales aren’t a campaign; they represent forty-eight years of cumulative creativity – a lesson in maintaining a consistent course.

The lesson isn’t complex. It’s simply one that the industry lacks the financial incentive to learn and the institutional capacity to retain. The data from Ipsos, arriving weeks after the spectacle, underscores this point with stark clarity.