The Super Bowl’s Best Ads: Insights to Activate

The Super Bowl is one of the only mass audience advertising events left, with 123 million viewers watching nationwide. And for $7 million for 30 seconds of airtime, the stakes are incredibly high. This pushes advertisers to deliver their most innovative and impactful creative work, making the Super Bowl ads a spectacle in themselves, often generating as much buzz as the game.

At Ipsos, we understand that great advertising is more than just entertainment. It's about understanding people — their lives, motivations, and the role brands play within them. We believe that creative excellence is a journey, not a destination. It's a continuous process of discovery, insight, and refinement.

That's why each year through our Super Bowl ad awards, we celebrate the ads that most effectively meet the brand’s business goals and objectives. We go beyond the simplistic ratings and star systems employed by others. And what we’ve learned over the years is that even well-known brands that are Super Bowl veterans can struggle to deliver. A quarter of the ads tested over the past three years failed to make a significant impact in terms of creative effectiveness or in generating buzz.

So what can we expect in 2025?

Humor, celebrities, AI and nostalgia are sure to abound in this year’s Super Bowl. In our latest detailed paper we deep dive into how some of these tactics can lead to effective advertising for the Super Bowl and beyond. For each, we highlight data about how these approaches benefit brands, what audiences would like to see, examples of past award winners who scored a touchdown, and finally, we offer our prediction on what we expect to see in this year’s game.