Super Bowl Ads Are Marketing to the Algorithms

After a few years of relatively stagnant viewership in and around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Super Bowl has reclaimed its status as a perennially record-setting television event. The 2025 game was the most-watched telecast in US history, with nearly 128 million viewers. The broadcast whose record it broke was the 2024 Super Bowl.

So maybe it’s not a surprise that ad inventory for the 2026 game sold out “earlier than ever,” according to NBCUniversal, on whose networks the game will air, with 30-second spots reportedly priced at $7 million.

But are those smart investments? We’re talking about a 105-year-old sports league whose fans average 55 years of age. And from a media perspective, spending $7 million to fill half a minute of football-game airtime hardly seems innovative. In an extremely online and algorithmically directed world, where marketers are able to use huge amounts of data and niche channels to target minutely tailored audiences, it may seem downright anachronistic. Blowing the budget on a Super Bowl ad is a marketing strategy of a very old vintage.

And yet, some of the sharpest minds behind the most influential brands in the world are still eager to pay a premium to be a part of the big game—not in spite of modern digital marketing but because of it. The era of big data and specialized channels is also the era of endless and eminently disposable artificial-intelligence slop, and against that backdrop, the Super Bowl spot has become the ultimate designation of value. It is the verification badge that legitimizes a monthlong digital campaign, signaling to both human audiences and algorithmic models that this brand, this moment, and this narrative matter.

A few decades ago, a Super Bowl ad was the entirety of the marketing event. Apple’s classic ad from the 1984 Super Bowl was kept under wraps until the broadcast and was only ever shown once. However, now marketers will tease ads as early as possible and try to keep the effects going indefinitely.

In the digital age, the value of a Super Bowl ad lies in the injection of data and interest into the online ecosystem, making it about far more than the 30-second spot itself.

Apple needed a “shock and awe” strategy because it had no internet. Today, shock and awe is inefficient. You need sustained algorithmic relevance. The algorithms powering Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X feed off velocity and volume. They reward engagement signals such as search queries, mentions, shares, and watch time. A monthlong campaign trains the recommendation algorithms to recognize your brand entity as trending, ensuring that when the $7 million spot finally airs, the algorithmic pathways are already greased to push your content to the top of the feed because it’s part of an evolving story.

A good contrast to the old paradigm represented by Apple’s “1984” ad is Dunkin’s 2024 spot featuring Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Tom Brady as a boy band called the DunKings. The ad didn’t just reach viewers during the Super Bowl—it served as the core of a dynamic ecosystem before, during, and after the game.