Super Bowl updates—ad winners and losers

Ad Age’s Super Bowl LIX newsletter brought you all the breaking news, analysis and first looks at the high-stakes Big Game commercials. With our final 2025 edition, we present all the latest metrics on how advertisers scored in the game. While this newsletter is going on hiatus, you can sign up here for Ad Age’s other newsletters to ensure you keep getting the latest insights on creativity, marketing, agency moves and more. Old-school beer marketing tactics win While USA Today’s Ad Meter is not the most universally loved ranking, it is the most widely cited—and because of that there is probably plenty of cheer inside Anheuser-Busch InBev’s marketing department today. The brewer’s Budweiser Clydesdales ad took the top spot, validating the company’s last-minute decision to extend the buy from regional to national. Not only that, but AB InBev claimed four of the top 10 spots in the ranking, with Michelob Ultra’s “The Ultra Hustle” (3), Stella Artois’ “David + David” (4) and Bud Light’s Bud Light’s “Big Men on Cul-de-Sac” (7) rounding out its haul. It is worth noting that the brewer released all of its ads early, which could have helped. The Bud Light ad, which featured Peyton Manning, Shane Gillis, Post Malone and plenty of suburban dad jokes, is more evidence that the brand is all-in on sophomoric humor again, after veering to a more sophisticated approach a couple of years ago. Wholesalers and retailers are apparently happy about that shift. “Retailer executions leading up to the Super Bowl were the most aggressive in years,” reports trade magazine Beer Business Daily, citing Bump Williams of Bump Williams Consulting, who noted that the “return of humorous, nostalgic beer advertising” has retailers “PSYCHED to be happy again!” Watch all the Super Bowl 2025 commercials A whole lotta love for Nike When it comes to industry insiders, Nike’s “So Win” spot from Wieden+Kennedy Portland did the best. The ad, which shows Sha’Carri Richardson, Caitlin Clark, Jordan Chiles and Sabrina Ionescu busting through female athlete stereotypes, was the Super Clio Winner, which was judged this year by a jury of 19 marketers and agency and production leaders. “Great to see Nike returning to iconic storytelling. Brilliant craft, tension and capitalizing on a movement in sports that is still underserved and underrepresented,” said jury member Jon Halvorson, senior VP of consumer experience and digital commerce at Mondelēz International. Ad Age Creativity Editor Tim Nudd was also a fan of the ad. The spot, backed by Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” was one of only two ads that earned five stars in Nudd’s Super Bowl ad review. The writing in the spot “carries the piece with its rhythms and contradictory wordplay. The result is one of the stronger sports ads we’ve seen in a while,” Nudd wrote. Nike did not stop with its in-game ad. The brand weighed in post-game on the Philadelphia Eagles victory with a social video set to Kermit the Frog’s “It’s Not Easy Being Green” that documents the team’s rise. Nudd also gave five stars to Google’s “Dream Job,” noting that while the ad is about AI, “it’s also not—it’s about being human, and the technology that just happens to help us along the way.” Ad Age’s Super Bowl ad review Lackluster But overall, the consensus among industry observers is that this year’s game lacked some of the creativity of years past. For instance, Nudd handed out two five-star rankings this year, down from seven five-star rankings in 2024. A panel of Gen Z marketers assembled by Ad Age did not give out a single five-star ranking. The Ad Meter’s scores of the top five ads, which are all between 3.49 and 3.56, are much lower than the 2024 top rankings, which were all above 6. New York Times TV critic Mike Hale wrote that “it was a bad year for ads,” adding that “there was a lot of fussy, overly complicated silliness and not much in the way of simple, effective storytelling or mood setting.” Slate’s Luke Winkie took aim at several ads, including the Uber Eats spot, “which reminds the world mostly of a happier time, when Matthew McConaughey was a movie star instead of … whatever the hell this is.” Jay Busbee and Ian Casselberry of Yahoo Sports panned HexClad’s ad: “Seemed like it was setting up a scenario where Gordon Ramsay was going to cook up some alien food, and then devolved into … yet another celebrity Super Bowl ad, this one making wacky commentary on celebrities themselves!” Earlier today, Ad Age journalists dug deeper into some of the night’s highs and lows. Watch—Super Bowl 2025 hits and misses But wait, there’s more Of course, with so many Super Bowl ad scorecards out there, brands are likely to find something to tout. Below, sample of some other hot takes and metrics: Social media analytics firm Sprout Social reports Tubi was the most talked-about advertiser on social media on Super Bowl Sunday, generating 5,654,692,414 impressions. TV measurement firm iSpot.tv, which ran a consumer panel on the Super Bowl ads, rated Pfizer’s “Knock Out” as the most likeable commercial. “The most attentive moment” in the game went to the “No Reason to Hate” ads starring Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady from the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, according to the TVision Attention Index from Lumen and TVision. Cars.com calculated that Ram’s ad resulted in a 436% lift in traffic to its web pages. But the second-place spot went to a brand that did not even run an ad in the game—the appearance of a 1987 Buick Regal GNX in Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show drove a 182% lift in traffic to Buick’s web pages, and 451% lift specifically for used Buick Regal pages. “At this very moment, Buick is cooler than it has been in decades,” wrote Jason Torchinsky of The Autopian. While Coffee mate’s dancing tongue spot got some bad reviews, Seattle ad agency DNA&Stone, which conducted its own review, ranked it as the third-best spot in the game. “In one sense, this spot was very formulaic: people use product, product does crazy thing, people are fulfilled, end card. But I just loved how weird this one was,” wrote agency founder Matt McCain. “Let’s face it: tongues are freaking bizarre and watching one dance in front of an audience and play bar chimes was delicious.” Pringles’ “The Call of the Mustaches” seemed equally polarizing. But Ad Age’s Gen Z panel gave it pretty high marks: “Flying mustaches are so 2012 but in a good way. Fun premise, well executed, a good example of nonsensical humor,” said one respondent.

Super Bowl updates—ad winners and losers

Featured Stories