Building a Super Bowl Marketing Strategy That’s a Runaway Win
The Super Bowl isn’t just the priciest media buy on the calendar; it’s one of the clearest tests of whether your marketing can turn culture into real, compounding growth. For C-suite leaders, the question isn’t simply “can we afford it?” It’s “can we turn this into a repeatable asset instead of a one-night gamble?”
This guide is built for marketers asking exactly that. It breaks down how to approach Super Bowl marketing from deciding if you’re ready, to choosing between national and more accessible plays, to building the creative, cross-channel, and measurement systems that ensure the investment pays off. Along the way, you’ll see how brands like e.l.f., eos, Instacart, Poppi, and Ramp have applied these principles in different ways.
Table of Contents
- Why the old Super Bowl playbook is broken
- Super Bowl strategies for prime time ad buys
- Super Bowl strategy matrix
- Full-funnel tactics for before, during, and after the Big Game
- Super Bowl campaign strategies any marketer can afford
- Determining if you’re ready for the Super Bowl
- Creative that actually works on this stage
- How to measure the success of Super Bowl advertising
- The C-suite checklist for a runaway win
- Turning the Super Bowl from a bet to a growth lever
“The greatest risk for brands is not considering where the Super Bowl fits into their larger brand journey. Marketers must pivot from asking if they can afford a spot to whether they should.
A winning strategy replaces the gamble of a single ad with a measurable, 360-degree approach that capitalizes on the full window of audience engagement.”
– Rachel Costanzo Senior Director of Media Investment at Tinuiti
Key takeaways:
- The Super Bowl is a full-funnel, multi-week marketing ecosystem—not a single TV ad. Winning strategies activate before, during, and after the game across channels.
- A national Super Bowl spot is optional. Brands can drive impact through CTV, streaming, local TV, social, creators, search, retail media, and CRM at lower risk and cost.
- “Surround the moment” outperforms one-and-done buys. The strongest Super Bowl marketing strategies orchestrate TV, digital, and performance media together.
- Not every brand is Super Bowl-ready—and that’s strategic. Readiness depends on audience clarity, brand distinctiveness, and proven performance foundations.
- Creative must be platform-native and rooted in brand truth. Ads that align with channel norms and clear product insights earn attention; trend-chasing erodes it.
- Real success is measured beyond game day. Effective Super Bowl campaigns deliver sustained lifts in awareness, consideration, and revenue using MMM, brand lift, and ROAS—not just buzz.
The old Super Bowl playbook is broken
Most classic Super Bowl playbooks were built for a different era: a single, linear feed, a short list of big sponsors, and a single “Monday morning watercooler” conversation. In that world, one great 30-second spot could reasonably carry the whole investment.
That world is gone. Today, the game spans streaming apps, alternative broadcasts, social feeds, gaming, and sports betting experiences. Viewers are just as locked into their phones as they are to the big screen, checking bets, scrolling reactions, and replaying ads on demand.
What’s more, the window for capturing attention no longer starts and stops with the whistle. Social and search activity spikes before and after the game, as brands release teasers early and highlight clips circulate for days.
In that context, the riskiest move for a leadership team is clinging to a narrow definition of being in the Super Bowl: a single national TV spot plus a token social post. There are now multiple ways to show up, each with its own risk–return profile:
- A national in-game spot.
- Heavy alignment with pre- and post-game coverage and playoff ramps.
- Local buys in priority DMAs instead of the national feed.
- Streaming and CTV packages in and around the game.
- Second-screen and social programs that assume your customer is just as likely to see the work on TikTok as on CBS or Fox.
“The Super Bowl is no longer an exclusive club reserved for the Fortune 100. Today, brands of all sizes and budgets should consider how to lean into the cultural momentum of the game.
The fragmented media landscape has a wealth of opportunities for performance-driven brands to build a curated approach that aligns with their specific KPIs.”
– Rachel Costanzo Senior Director of Media Investment at Tinuiti
Common Super Bowl marketing strategies for prime time ad buys
Once you recognize that the Super Bowl is an ecosystem, not just a three-hour broadcast, the national TV spot becomes one option in a much bigger toolkit. It’s still the most visible play, and it’s also where the stakes are highest. Which is why it deserves its own strategy rather than defaulting to “we should be there because everyone else is.”
Timing and inventory basics
National Super Bowl spots are limited and usually sold well in advance, often during the spring upfronts. The cost of a national 30-second Super Bowl LIX spot went as high as $8+ million, excluding production, digital, and cross-channel investments required to support it. For many brands, the Super Bowl is the single largest line item in their annual media plan.
That’s why brands like Poppi started planning their Super Bowl presence in May prior, building a runway that included NFL playoff TV, streaming, and retail media to ensure the spot sat atop a broader system rather than standing alone.
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“If you want to buy a national Super Bowl unit, you need to be participating in the upfronts. Planning the Super Bowl out further in advance and centering other efforts around the spot is significantly less stressful, more measurable, and leads to a noticeably stronger performance than deciding to do a spot at the last minute.”
– Kenny Bianchi Director, Client Partner, Tinuiti
Who you reach during the game
The Super Bowl remains one of the rare moments when nearly a third of the population is watching at once, across linear, streaming, and second screens. The 2025 showdown between the Eagles and Chiefs reached 126 million viewers across FOX, Tubi, FOX Deportes, Telemundo, and NFL properties, with Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance drawing an estimated 131.2 million viewers.
Audience nuance still matters:
- First-half placements, especially near halftime, tend to deliver broader and more female-skewed viewership.
- Halftime talent and player narratives (for example, a major artist or a high-profile player relationship) can shift who tunes in and how engaged they are.
- Streaming simulcasts and alternative feeds (such as Tubi) can skew younger, more digitally savvy, and more likely to multitask on other devices.
Ad creative: Earning your place in the moment
On a stage where every brand brings its best, a Super Bowl spot has to do more than land a joke. It needs a clear story, emotional weight, and a strong connection back to the product or brand truth.
Winning Super Bowl creative usually:
- Has a clear role in the funnel. The Super Bowl spot should introduce or reinforce the brand story, not try to do everything at once.
- Invests in production where it matters. High-quality craft signals seriousness and helps stand out amid noise. Lo-fi can work, but only when it’s intentional and authentic to your brand.
- Leans into emotion. Humor, nostalgia, “happy-sad,” or a powerful human insight is often what makes a spot worth talking about after the game.
- Has a clear role in the funnel. The Super Bowl spot should introduce or reinforce the brand story, not try to do everything at once.
- Anchors in a real product or brand truth. e.l.f.’s first Super Bowl spot centered on Power Grip Primer’s “sticky” benefit. It tied it to Jennifer Coolidge’s cultural moment and her wish to “play a dolphin,” creating a memorable #dolphinskin platform.
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“To truly earn your place in the Super Bowl moment, creative must be more than just a ‘fun ad’. It must be a synergistic blend of high-impact brand storytelling and platform authenticity. Success comes from developing a ‘true brand creative’ that is playful, emotive, and anchored in your product truth, while resisting the urge to simply ‘copy-paste’ that spot across the ecosystem.
The most effective campaigns recognize that while high-craft production signals seriousness, the real magic happens when you marry community, culture, and creativity to ensure your message feels organic and endemic to wherever your audience discovers it.”
– Laura Ross Director, Client Partner, Tinuiti
Super Bowl marketing strategy matrix
Once you view the Super Bowl as an ecosystem rather than a single ad, the question becomes how to participate—not whether to show up at all. This matrix outlines the most common Super Bowl marketing strategies, mapped by budget, objectives, and tactics.
| Strategy type | Budget level | Best for | Primary objective | Key tactics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| National in-game spot | High | Established or scaled brands with a strong foundation and broad goals. | Mass awareness and cultural impact. | 15–60s national spot, full surround media plan, MMM support to read impact across channels. |
| Surround-moment TV (pre/post & local) | Medium | Brands wanting TV presence without national in-game pricing (e.g., eos-style launches). | Awareness in priority markets. | Pre- and post-game units, local linear buys in key DMAs, supported by streaming and paid social. |
| Digital & streaming-led | Low–medium | Performance-oriented or digitally native brands. | Awareness plus measurable engagement / traffic. | CTV in-and-around the game, YouTube against highlights and recaps, OTT sponsorships and high-impact digital units. |
| Social, creator & CRM-led | Low–medium | Smaller budgets, niche audiences, or brands testing into the moment. | Engagement, list growth, and conversion. | Real-time social campaigns, creator watch-parties, email “stock up for the game” pushes, and retargeting flows. |
Before, during, and after: Orchestrating the moment
“The most impactful campaigns are a result of ‘surround sound.’ You want everything to work in concert, like an orchestra. The Super Bowl is the drums—it’s loud and amazing—but how much better do those drums sound when there is also a guitar, a piano, and strings? You need that harmony and synergy across the entire ecosystem to make the most noise and cut through in the biggest way.”
–Meg Crowley Group Director, Client Partner, Tinuiti
The brands that succeed in Super Bowl marketing treat the spot as part of a full-funnel marketing plan, not a one-off. Here’s a simple way to structure that system.
1. Tease (weeks before kickoff)
- Release teasers and cutdowns on TikTok, YouTube, and Meta.
- Tap talent and creators to build anticipation and start the conversation.
- Make sure search and shoppable experiences are ready so “Brand + Super Bowl ad” queries land on your properties first.
2. Game day
- Place the spot strategically (often in the first half, near halftime for brands with broad or female-skewing audiences).
- Launch the remaining media immediately after the spot airs: YouTube uploads, paid social, and high-impact digital placements.
- Monitor real-time performance and conversation for any needed pivots.
3. Post-game burst
- Max reach: Use high-impact units (TikTok TopView, homepage takeovers) to deliver tens of millions of impressions quickly.
- Contextual alignment: Show up where people are talking about the game—X, Reddit, TikTok content tied to Super Bowl coverage.
- Audience layering: Recenter your cor-category audience by layering segments (e.g., beauty + sports) to create deeper creative cuts.
4. Sustain (weeks after)
- Continue running evolved versions of the creative in relevant tentpoles (award shows, March Madness, major premieres) and always-on channels.
- Use exposure data to build retargeting audiences and continue engaging with the audience who saw the spot.
Super Bowl campaign strategies any marketer can afford
A national in-game spot is only one way to participate in Super Bowl marketing, and for many brands, it’s not the right strategy. What matters is finding the level of involvement that aligns with your budget, your stage of growth, and how clearly you can tie the spend to business outcomes.
That’s where “surround the moment” strategies come in. Instead of anchoring everything on a single 30-second spot, you can use a mix of local linear, streaming, social, creator, email, and retail media plays to tap into the Super Bowl moment at a fraction of the cost. All while still building a clear path from awareness to conversion.
Alternative broadcast placements
Beyond the main national broadcast:
- Pre- and post-game coverage. Spots in the hours around the game can be significantly more affordable while still benefiting from heightened attention.
- Family-friendly simulcasts. Channels like Nickelodeon’s kid-focused coverage open inventory for categories that don’t fit the main broadcast’s ad rules.
- Counter-programming (like Puppy Bowl). These events attract viewers who actively avoid the game but still participate in the overall cultural moment.
- Streaming-only presence. Broadcasters like CBS and NBC offer streaming-only in-game packages across their OTT platforms, allowing brands to create a marquee moment at a fraction of the cost of a full national unit, and to a younger, affluent audience.
Local and regional spots
Buying local linear TV in key DMAs instead of a national spot can significantly reduce costs while focusing on the markets that matter most to your business. For eos, for example, a local linear buy with pre-game and in-game units, supported by streaming, YouTube, and paid social, allowed the brand to spotlight its new body wash line without paying national-spot prices.
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Social media campaigns and the second screen
Most viewers will check their phones during the game for scores, bets, texts, and social feeds. That creates an opening for:
- Real-time social campaigns timed to ad breaks and halftime.
- Short-form video built around reactions, behind-the-scenes content, or challenges tied to the game.
- Paid social that reinforces your message while people are already in “scroll and share” mode.
Influencers, creators, and affiliates
Creators and affiliates can extend your reach into specific communities:
- Co-created content that drops before and after the game.
- Watch-party integrations where creators incorporate your product into their Super Bowl plans.
- Discount codes and trackable links to tie activity back to performance.
Riding the media buzz
Super Bowl generates days of commentary beyond the ads themselves. Innovative brands look for:
- Opportunities to provide expert commentary (e.g., on marketing trends, category topics).
- Timely press releases or thought leadership around the themes your brand can credibly speak to.
- Participation in post-game rankings and recaps that extend the life of your creative.
Email and CRM
Not every touchpoint has to be flashy:
- “Stock up for the game” emails with product bundles and recipes.
- Reminders about delivery cutoffs or limited-time offers ahead of kickoff.
- Post-game follow-ups thanking customers and encouraging repeat purchase.
For a brand like Poppi, sending email reminders to customers to “order sodas for the game” ahead of time can be a simple yet effective way to tie tentpole awareness to directly measurable sales.
Streaming and YouTube placements
Not everyone watches on linear. Many fans rely on:
- CTV streams of the game via apps like Tubi.
- YouTube highlight reels, recap shows, and creator breakdowns.
Advertising against this content—before, during, and after the game—can be an efficient way to tap into Super Bowl attention, especially for digitally native or younger audiences.
Retargeting: Turning awareness into action
Whatever mix of tactics you choose, retargeting is how you turn initial Super Bowl marketing impressions into revenue:
- Build audiences from exposed users on CTV, social, and YouTube.
- Use those segments in the weeks after the game across paid social, search, and retail media.
- Adapt creative to where people are in the funnel: more product and offer-driven messages as you move closer to conversion.
“Success in the Super Bowl ecosystem is no longer defined by a 30-second national spot; it’s about the strategic intersection of content and timing. Whether through digital takeovers, local broadcasts, or streaming-only packages, brands can activate across the entire event timeline. These levers allow brands to capture the cultural spotlight through a tailored fit without the national broadcast price tag.“
–Rachel Costanzo Senior Director, Media Strategy & Operations, Tinuiti
These aren’t backup options; they’re smart, right-sized Super Bowl marketing strategies that match where your brand is and how much risk you’re willing to take on.
Are you actually ready for the Super Bowl?
Not every brand should be investing in Super Bowl marketing this year. Being honest about that is one of the most important C-suite calls you can make.
The following readiness framework outlines how different brand situations should approach the Super Bowl and the non-negotiable foundations required before moving forward.
Two hard truths sit under this:
- If you don’t know exactly who your customer is and why they buy, you’re likely years away from the Super Bowl being your highest-ROI move.
- e.l.f.’s breakout wasn’t just about a clever spot; it rested on years of reading community comments, saturating Gen Z, and sharpening its brand voice before ever investing in the Super Bowl.
“The Super Bowl is not something I would ever recommend for a brand-new company just starting out. It is an incredible way to take a brand to the next level, but only once that brand has already done a good job building success with its core audience.
You have to ‘lay the logs’ and saturate your niche first so that when you finally light the match at the Super Bowl, the fire actually takes off. If a brand doesn’t even know who their audience is yet, they have years to go before this is the right move.“
–Meg Crowley Group Director, Client Partner, Tinuiti
Poppi followed a similarly disciplined arc. The brand didn’t wake up and decide to buy a Super Bowl spot; planning began during the prior May upfronts, with a TV ramp-up through the NFL playoffs and a clear view of how the game-day moment would sit atop retail and streaming integrations. If your team can’t sketch that kind of runway, your best move may be to build the foundation now and treat the Super Bowl as a future accelerator rather than a near-term fix.
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Creative that actually works on this stage
Super Bowl viewers reward sharp, on-brand creative, while exposing anything that isn’t. Two principles matter most: platform fit and funnel match.
Platform endemicity
Your creative has to feel native to where it runs:
- On TikTok and short-form social, people expect fast hooks, trend awareness, and content that feels like it belongs in their feed.
- On TV, CTV, and long-form YouTube, viewers tolerate (and expect) more produced storytelling and clearer branding.
- In retail media and commerce environments, shoppers are in a buying mindset; creatives should be product- and payoff-driven, with a clear path to purchase.
For leadership, this comes down to a budgeting decision. If the idea doesn’t fit the channel, you end up paying for impressions that are far less likely to drive meaningful brand impact.
“We encourage brands to throw out the ‘all or nothing’ playbook of the past.’ Today, the Super Bowl is approachable for all brands because the content waterfalls into every channel. It’s less about being in the game itself and more about knowing your audience and finding the right pathway to be interwoven with the cultural moment.”
–Rachel Costanzo Senior Director, Media Strategy & Operations, Tinuiti
Funnel alignment
Match your story to where the customer is in the journey:
- Upper-funnel: Super Bowl spots and broad CTV should focus on brand storytelling and distinctiveness—what you stand for and why you belong in the conversation.
- Mid-funnel: Supporting video, display, and social can lean harder into product demonstrations, reasons to believe, and proof points.
- Conversion-ready: Retail media, search, and lower-funnel social need urgency and clarity. The job here is to remove friction, not add another twist to the story.
Two common failure modes are worth flagging:
- Sea of sameness. In categories like beauty, brands sometimes lean so hard into trends that their ads become interchangeable; if viewers can’t tell whether they saw you or a rival, you’ve effectively funded category awareness, not your own brand.
- Brand dissonance. When a brand chases a trend that doesn’t fit its identity, for example, a heritage luxury brand suddenly mimicking loud meme culture, it may grab attention. Still, it undercuts the story it has spent years building.
“The biggest misses happen when brands deviate too far from the ethos of who they are just to jump onto a trend that isn’t authentic to them. In a ‘sea of sameness’ where so many ads look alike, you lose the ability to stand out if your creative doesn’t tie back to your brand truth. You have to know who you are and why you’re unique well in advance of the ad buy, or you risk eroding your ability to actually connect with the audience.”
–Meg Crowley Group Director, Client Partner, Tinuiti
The Super Bowl magnifies both what’s working and what isn’t. It will reward a brand that knows exactly what it stands for and can translate that into a clear, memorable story, and it will just as quickly expose any confusion or drift in the narrative.
It’s not the moment to reinvent your brand identity or chase a trend that doesn’t fit. It’s the moment to show up as the sharpest version of your brand, grounded in the brand’s identity, aligned with your audience, and crystal clear about why your brand deserves a place in the conversation.
How to measure the success of a Super Bowl advertising strategy
For Super Bowl marketing to be investable, you need more than buzz; you need a clear framework for how success will be defined, tracked, and reported back to the business. That starts with setting expectations at the leadership level, so everyone is aligned on what good looks like before the spot ever airs.
1. Set expectations with leadership
Stakeholders often imagine instant website crashes or overnight sell-outs as the sign that a Super Bowl campaign worked. Those spikes still happen, but they’re no longer the norm, and they’re not the best way to judge success.
Stakeholders often imagine instant website crashes or overnight sell-outs as the sign that a Super Bowl campaign worked. Those spikes still happen, but they’re no longer the norm, and they’re not the best way to judge success.
In practice, the healthiest outcomes look more like a structural step up: brand and business metrics settle at a higher floor after the halo fades.
In practice, the healthiest outcomes look more like a structural step up: brand and business metrics settle at a higher floor after the halo fades.
“Any media spend can be wasted if you aren’t measuring it correctly. The biggest risk is committing to a high-impact moment without a strong measurement solution in place to track the actual impact of that spend. Without that framework, you’ll never know your actual return, and you’re essentially just throwing money into the void.”
– Laura Ross Director, Client Partner, Tinuiti
2. Choose the right KPIs
A practical Super Bowl scorecard includes:
Brand awareness and consideration
Track shifts in aided and unaided awareness, familiarity, and purchase consideration. Poppi, for example, saw almost a 13-point lift in brand awareness over two months after its Super Bowl spot, which is exceptional for an established brand.
Revenue and ROAS
Many Super Bowl programs are primarily brand plays, but Poppi’s near-1x ROAS on its 60-second spot shows that, with the right cross-channel architecture, even an eight-figure line item can defend itself on short-term revenue.
Earned Media Value (EMV)
For brands like e.l.f., EMV is often where the real upside sits—PR coverage, influencer content, and organic social can add up to value that exceeds paid media when community, talent, and culture all align.
Baseline shift
The most crucial question: what does your new normal look like? After e.l.f.’s first Super Bowl activation, the brand saw 57 billion global impressions, #1 brand sentiment among 2023 Big Game spots, and a 64% week-over-week lift in purchase consideration. Power Grip Primer sales jump from one sold every 8 seconds to one every 3.5 seconds, with a halo effect across the business.
3. Connect Super Bowl to your measurement stack
To make Super Bowl marketing accountable, you need to plan how it will be read before you spend:
- Use media mixed modeling (MMM) and BlissPoint-style models to estimate and then validate impact:
- Rapid MMM for online sales.
- Geo MMM for in-store.
- Brand Equity MMM for awareness.
- Ensure your tagging and segmentation can distinguish Super Bowl-related exposure across channels so future models can capture the signal.
“We use Tinuiti’s MMM tools—specifically Rapid MMM for online sales, Geo MMM for in-store tracking, and Equity MMM for brand recognition—to see exactly which channels are driving the highest impact.
Planning the Super Bowl further in advance and centering other efforts around the spot using this data makes the investment significantly less stressful and far more trackable. It allows us to create a feedback loop where we can confidently prove that a major bet, like an $11 million spot, actually delivered a noticeably stronger performance, achieving a 1x ROAS alongside a massive 13-point jump in brand awareness.”
– Kenny Bianchi Director, Client Partner, Tinuiti
Poppi’s 2025 campaign is a good example of this discipline: the team used MMM to calibrate channel investments, and the data clearly showed both short-term ROAS and long-term awareness lift.
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The C-suite checklist for a Super Bowl runaway win
When Tinuiti works with executive teams on Super Bowl strategy, the conversation usually centers on a few core questions.
Strategic fit
- Does this Super Bowl marketing plan clearly support our three- to five-year growth strategy, not just fill a spot on this year’s calendar?
- Are we confident we actually need an in-game spot—or would a surround-sound moment approach be a more innovative use of budget for where the brand is today?
Audience and brand clarity
- Can we say, in one sentence, who this campaign is for and what truth about our brand we’re putting on the biggest stage?
- Have we done the work to make sure we’re not just another face in a “sea of sameness” in our category?
Orchestration
- Do we have a clear cross-channel plan—tease, game day, post-game, and sustain—with defined roles for TV, CTV, social, creators, search, and retail media?
- If we do have a Super Bowl spot, is it acting as the crown jewel of that system rather than the whole show?
Measurement
- Are we set up to present this moment in MMM, brand-lift, and EMV reporting in a way that will withstand scrutiny from finance and the board?
- Do we have agreed-upon success ranges and a plan for how we’ll reinvest if we outperform expectations?
Risk and resilience
- Have we stress-tested the creative for potential misalignment with our brand or with cultural flashpoints that could distract from the story we want to tell?
- Are we clear on what we will not do, even if a last-minute trend tempts us to chase short-term attention at the expense of long-term equity?
Turning the Super Bowl from a bet to a growth lever
The Super Bowl remains one of the last true monocultural moments. It is a chance to put your brand in front of an audience you can’t replicate anywhere else.
But the real advantage doesn’t come from buying 30 second spots; it comes from treating the game as the center of a strategy that’s grounded in the basics you’ve just worked through: knowing whether you’re ready, choosing the right level of participation, building surround-sound media, getting the creative and timing right, and wiring the whole thing into your measurement stack.
When those pieces are in place, the Super Bowl stops being a high-stakes one-off and starts functioning like any other smart growth investment: it has a clear role in your multi-year plan, defined success ranges, and a path from awareness to revenue that your finance team can see and your board can understand.
That’s the core shift this playbook is designed to make: The shift away from “Do we dare?” to “How do we use this moment, at the right scale, to drive durable results for the brand?”
Ready to turn game-day buzz into long-term brand equity?
Contact us today to learn how our experts can partner with you to shape and execute a comprehensive marketing strategy that wins before, during, and long after the final whistle.
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