Which Brands Won This Year’s Super Bowl?

Another Super Bowl is in the books, and it’s no surprise that about one in five viewers tuned in primarily for the latest high-profile, celebrity-driven, big-budget television commercials. For brands and their creative partners, the Super Bowl is, well, the Super Bowl of advertising. These commercials aim to follow in the footsteps of Apple, Pepsi, Nike, and other legendary brands whose best ads have outlasted the memory of the actual game. As football has changed in recent years, so have the success criteria for winning Super Bowl ad campaigns.

For a Super Bowl commercial to make the $8 million per spot investment pay out in 2025, it must resonate beyond the 30-second impression. To engage and motivate audiences to buy, Super Bowl campaigns need to deliver on three critical elements:

• Does the ad connect with the emotional priorities of people who buy the product?
• Is there a second-screen engagement opportunity to extend a 30-second TV impression into five minutes or more of online interaction and value exchange?
• Are the promotional aspects of the campaign reflective of the target consumer (e.g., use of celebrities, prize giveaways, gamification, special offers, etc.)?

Leveraging our Sooth audience data, we evaluated all 56 Super Bowl ads, awarding up to 20 points each for Emotion, Second-Screen Engagement, and Promotional Relevance — or ESP, for short.

Credit: Sooth

Out of all ads scored, Sooth gave its highest ESP scores — predicted to perform best in terms of revenue impact for their respective brands — to the following advertisers:

• Stella Artois (score 52/60): Although parent company A-B InBev made us wait until the fourth quarter for a surprisingly entertaining and compelling spot featuring David Beckham and Matt Damon as twin brothers separated at birth, the joke works. The message carries well to the website creatively. However, the site offers little interaction or value exchange, keeping the score from approaching perfection.
• GoDaddy (score 50/60): Got your Walton Goggins' Goggles? This engaging campaign uses a red-hot celebrity to deliver a powerful message about the struggles of small business owners and the many jobs they lack the skills to perform, including building their company website. The website experience is impressive, offering seamless content integration and an enticing offer of $1 per week for web services.
• Nerds (score 47/60): Nerds outduels Reese's and other candy brands with a strong product introduction ad that makes excellent use of crossover country artist Shaboozey, covering yet another beloved song, the Louis Armstrong classic, “What a Wonderful World.” Unlike Reese's, Nerds scores by extending the campaign and bringing its promotional power to the forefront on its brand site.
• Michelob Ultra (score 46/60): Older people like to drink beer and kick butt too, as exemplified here by Catherine O'Hara, Willem Dafoe, Michelob Ultra, and the sport of older kings and queens — pickleball. It works on TV and in the online experience that follows.
• Totino’s (score 45/60): One of the most genuinely funny advertisements in this year’s game, the spot effectively utilizes comic actors Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson while also creating an appetite for the product. The online experience maintains cohesiveness throughout, including a mini-movie extended commercial cut.
• Coors Light (score 45/60): The Silver Bullet brand finally gets off the train to deliver a Super Bowl commercial with an original idea — to be the official beer of Super Bowl Monday (and other similarly awful Mondays). The clever ad and promotion are backed by strong online content and a commemorative product.

At the other end of the spectrum, three campaigns failed to score in double digits, and we predict they will have minimal brand and revenue impact:

• Bosch (score 4/60): Why Antonio “Boschderas” and why is he eating a giant Bugs Bunny carrot? Why a Macho Man impersonator? What does any of this have to do with a $3,000 fridge? Audiences were likely left asking similar questions, and the lack of any second-screen engagement undermines any opportunity to engage beyond the commercial. This is our pick for the worst Super Bowl ad of 2025.
• Doritos (score 5/60): How do you make $8 million vanish without a trace in 30 seconds? Once again, Doritos has provided us with a fan film that lacks anything besides branding and a few polite laughs — with no online continuity whatsoever.
• Lays (score 6/60): Sometimes emotion feels genuine and sometimes it feels forced. For anyone who may have been lulled into believing PepsiCo’s potato chips are vegetables grown from tubers by young children, the jig is up as soon as one discovers no sign of the saccharine spot on the brand’s website.

The stakes for Super Bowl advertisers are higher than ever. Brands that follow compelling broadcast creative with strong activation in the form of digital engagement and audience-appropriate promotion will generate the biggest business wins. For those that failed to deliver beyond the 30-second commercial, in the words of legendary coach Vince Lombardi, “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get back up.”

Ian Baer is the founder and chief soothsayer of the strategic insights platform and marketing consultancy Sooth.