In a year when Super Bowl ad spots hit a jaw-dropping $8 million per 30 seconds—enough to buy a private island or fund a small startup—brands chose to play it safer than a banker in bubble wrap. Their universal strategy? Throw celebrities at the screen until viewers cry uncle.

It’s a safe bet, sure. A tried-and-true method to get eyeballs and headlines. But when every single brand is doing it, what happens? They all blend together like a Hollywood wrap party in a blender—loud, expensive, and ultimately forgettable.

The Year of the Celebrity Pile-On

What happens when you pay A-listers $3-5 million each to hawk your products? You get Matthew McConaughey cosplaying as Mike Ditka for Uber Eats, while Meta’s Ray-Ban spectacular became a game of “Spot the Chris” (Hemsworth, Pratt) with a side of Kris Jenner. The celebrity density reached such critical mass that physicists at CERN expressed concern.

The Ben Affleck and Matt Damon cross-commercial name-dropping felt less like clever marketing and more like a game of Million Dollar Tag between old friends. Meanwhile, Aubrey Plaza continued her reign as Super Bowl’s brand-hopping champion, this time bringing her trademark deadpan to Ritz alongside Michael Shannon and Bad Bunny in what can only be described as the world’s most expensive poker face convention.

The Humor Overload (And the Few That Stood Out by Going the Other Way)

While Pringles and Little Caesars engaged in The Great Facial Hair Olympics of 2025, and DoorDash tried to make “Girl Math” happen with Nate Bargatze, a few brave souls dared to swim against the tide of forced chuckles.

The standouts weren’t just different—they were defiantly earnest:

• Pfizer’s “Knock Out Cancer” married LL Cool J’s gravitas with genuine emotion, proving you don’t need a punchline to punch hard.
• Dove’s “Running Girl” showed that in a world of trying-too-hard, simply trying-to-matter still works.
• The NFL’s “It Takes All of Us” campaign cut through the noise like a lighthouse through fog with the emotional call that drives us all to make somebody feel like “somebody.”

In the cacophony of “Look how quirky we are!” these ads whispered—and somehow shouted louder than everything else.

The Smartest Bet of the Night? Budweiser’s Baby Clydesdale

In a landscape where companies were throwing celebrity millions around like confetti, Budweiser zigged while others zagged. (and earned top spot on USA Today’s Ad Meter) They tested their Baby Clydesdale spot “First Delivery” regionally, saw that it resonated big time, and made the right call to take it national. It turns out that in a world of artificial everything, authentic emotion still hits harder than a linebacker. The key insight here is that when your data is saying “You’ve got something special here,” you stomp on the gas and leverage the advantage. 

Final Takeaway: The Best Super Bowl Ads Didn’t Try Too Hard

When you’re spending $8 million per half-minute—more than some movies’ entire marketing budgets—there’s a temptation to kitchen-sink it. But this year proved that bigger budgets and bigger names don’t automatically equal bigger impact.

The brands that won? They either zigged when everyone else zagged (sentimentality over chaos) or they used data to push what already worked (looking at you, Budweiser).

Meanwhile, the celebrity-stuffed ads became a game of spot-the-star that felt less like marketing and more like a very expensive version of Where’s Waldo? When you’re paying up to $5 million per celebrity appearance, maybe it’s time to ask: Is this really the best way to spend the equivalent of a small country’s GDP?

See you next year, when we’ll inevitably have even more Aubrey Plaza and Matt Damon ads to dissect – assuming their agents haven’t started charging by the Super Bowl appearance.

Want to Win Your Own Big Game

While brands duke it out on advertising’s most expensive playground, your business has its own Super Bowl moment waiting to happen. Whether it’s a product launch, a rebrand, or a critical campaign, you don’t need an $8 million budget or Matt Damon’s phone number to make an impact.

What you need is the right mix of creative insight and data-driven strategy—the kind that made Budweiser’s Baby Clydesdale a winner and kept Dove’s message pure and powerful.

Ready to cut through the noise and make your brand stand out? Let’s talk about making your next campaign a champion. Drop me a line at nick@goelastic.com and let’s create something worth talking about—no celebrity pile-on required.

Because in marketing, just like in the Super Bowl, it’s not about how much you spend. It’s about how smart you play the game. And if you haven’t had enough of me already, here’s a chat I had with Fox-2 in St. Louis about this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads.