Racial representation in Super Bowl ads rose versus last year but lagged behind 2024, while celebrities skewed white and LGBTQ visibility fell again.
Allbirds and Warby Parker built their brands as digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs), cutting out the middleman to offer lower-priced products directly to consumers. Now, they’re confronting many of the same challenges as legacy brands: slowing ecommerce growth, rising customer acquisition costs, and an increasingly crowded competitive landscape.
Dollar General's retail media network DG Media Network is leveraging its massive physical footprint and growing digital capabilities to create a unique offering for advertisers seeking to reach rural and suburban America.
Fan remixes are turning into an attention engine, and brands that design for reinterpretation stand to win.
Algorithms now shape most ad spend: Decisioning is expanding beyond targeting, increasing scale while adding opacity across planning, execution, and measurement.
Winning back shoppers will require sharper value, better stores, and stronger loyalty.
Emotion won at the Super Bowl as Ring, Budweiser, and Amazon topped iSpot rankings by pairing heart, nostalgia, and humor with brand recognition.
Regulators say limiting rival chatbots on WhatsApp could breach competition rules and reshape AI distribution power.
YouTube TV is rolling out genre-specific options to curb churn, betting viewers prefer cheaper, targeted bundles over bloated pay TV.
Tech giants and brands leaned hard into AI-led creative, but consumer responses were mixed.
From ai.com to Claude and coders, AI ads led engagement, overtaking beer, autos, and other legacy categories.
Shoppers are open to AI help but will abandon carts after bad suggestions, showing personalization outweighs novelty.
Unions’ no-confidence vote underscores frustration as margins lag far behind Delta and United.
YouTube now outpaces Reddit in AI citations as models prioritize transcripts, metadata, and explanatory formats over engagement signals.
"The Super Bowl has grown from a football game into one of the biggest cultural moments for brands," said our analyst Suzy Davidkhanian in a recent episode of “Behind the Numbers.” The Super Bowl maintains its advertising relevance in an increasingly fragmented media landscape because it delivers something increasingly rare: A massive, diverse audience engaged in a shared cultural moment.
Installs barely grew but app purchases hit $167 billion. Saturated markets will force apps to extract more value from loyal users.
Job fears hit lower-income consumers hardest, making retail demand more uneven.
Novo’s Big Game spot can help reinforce the Wegovy pill’s credibility against copycat compounded versions.