The Super Bowl has always worked as a cultural barometer. Long before dashboards, attribution models, and performance metrics took over this was the moment brands used to show how they saw the world and how they wanted to be seen inside it.

If you trace Super Bowl advertising over the decades, you can map the evolution of brand marketing almost perfectly.

In the 90s, the brief was simple. Be seen by everyone. Spend big and make noise. Pepsi partnering with Michael Jackson wasn't subtle but it didn't need to be and it wasn’t supposed to be either. Nike turned athletes into icons and used the Super Bowl as a stage for cultural dominance. And we all know how that worked out for them… Marketing was about reach, repetition, and imprinting yourself into mass consciousness.

The early 2000s refined that thinking. The Super Bowl became a memory factory. Budweiser understood this better than anyone. The frogs, horses, simplicity. These weren't ads designed to explain anything. They were designed to be remembered. Brands stopped chasing cleverness and started chasing familiarity. The Super Bowl became part of the wider brand system, not just a media buy.

As audiences grew more media-literate, that approach started to lose its edge. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, emotion took centre stage. Enter Coca-Cola. They leaned into optimism and shared humanity. Volkswagen's Darth Vader spot worked because it trusted the audience to feel something without being told why. Brands began to realise that warmth and relatability could cut through more effectively than volume alone. 

Then the internet changed the rules completely.

The Super Bowl stopped being a single moment and became a trigger point for a much wider cultural play. Oreo's blackout tweet didn't just outperform ads that year, it reframed what winning looked like and made everyone stop and think. Cultural awareness, timing, and fluency started to matter more than production spend. The Super Bowl became one part of a much larger conversation rather than the conversation itself.

Over the last few years, that shift has accelerated into strategy.

Brands no longer treat the Super Bowl as a one-night highlight. They use it as a chapter in a much deeper brand story. Campaigns now begin weeks before kickoff and extend well beyond the final whistle. What's happening now is a move away from performance theatre and towards coherence.

The most effective Super Bowl campaigns today don't try to hijack attention. They earn it by aligning with how people already understand the brand. Tone, timing, and intent matter more than punchlines. The ‘ad’ works because it belongs to a system that exists before and after the game.

This mirrors a broader shift in brand marketing. Audiences don't experience brands in isolated moments anymore. They experience them across feeds, formats, and touchpoints over time. The Super Bowl is no longer a reset button. It's a stress test. A way to see whether a brand's story actually holds up at scale. Arguably on the biggest stage in North America.

There's also less tolerance for performative values. Purpose-led messaging without follow-through feels hollow on the biggest stage. People can see through that now more than ever before. What the Super Bowl tells us now is that marketing is moving towards continuity over novelty. Towards brands that know who they are and don't feel the need to prove it in thirty seconds. 

The game is still the biggest night in advertising. That hasn't changed. What's changed is how brands win it.

Not by being the loudest in the stadium, but by being the most aligned with themselves.

Shot of the good stuff.