Building A Super Bowl Marketing Strategy That’s A Runaway Win

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.

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.