Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Terry Ranks The Super Bowl 60 Ads

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Super Bowl 60 had an interesting mix of commercials - from humorous to emotional to plain weird. Terry ranks his favs and compares his list to audience favs.We know you want to listen to all the ads in this show. On the off-chance you don’t, subscribe ad-free here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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That's a spicy meatboard. What love doesn't conquer. Al Casalser will. What a relief. Or under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. Well, Super Bowl 60 has just wrapped up a few minutes ago. The Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots. They were playing in Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California,

which is about 50 miles south of San Francisco. That was the second time the Super Bowl has been played in that stadium as Super Bowl 50 was played there. Let's talk about the cost of Super Bowl advertising, which is always interesting to me. So, as one media buyers said, the Super Bowl is the only time of the year when viewers don't skip the ads, they actually turn up the volume,

and that's the captive attention that brands are paying for. And this year, brands paid $8 million for a 30-second ad. Some of the ad time went for $10 million for 30 seconds, and I'm not quite sure why some advertisers paid $10 million instead of $8. I suspect there were maybe only a couple of spots left, and there might have been a bidding war, and it went up to $10 million, which is amazing to me. Now, that's not all that advertisers have to pay to be in the Super Bowl.

The production of commercials, you can add another $1 to $5 million, depending on how ambitious the ad was or how many celebrities are in it. Celebrities alone are in the $3 to $5 million range. And when everything is tallied, a single Super Bowl commercial can be as much as $12 to $20 million as an all-in investment. So it is big dollars. And that is a 21,233% increase from the inaugural Super Bowl in 1967, when a commercial ad cost just $37,500, amazing. and Super Bowl advertising first crossed the $1 million mark in 1995. Now, in Canada, the prices are a bit different.

A 30-second Super Bowl ad on Canadian TV costs about $197,000 per spot as an average. So while the U.S. spots can exceed $8 million, we're paying under $200,000 for each Super Bowl spot here in Canada, because it is a smaller audience, and you don't have to pay as much money to be on the game. Now, let's talk audience. So last year, 127.7 million people watched the Super Bowl, which broke the Super Bowl all-time record, second only to the moon landing for viewership. And that audience rose to 133 million when Kendrick Lamar did the halftime show.

NBC revealed that Bad Bunny's halftime show attracted 135 million viewers, breaking that record. Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin made surprise appearances with Bad Bunny. And in the wedding scene, that was a real couple really getting married. So the NFL has seen a 10% growth in audience year over year, so their audience is growing. It's multi-generational. We're seeing more women than ever before. over 50% of the audience is female, and that's growing. That might be the Taylor Swift effect at work there.

The NFL has a Helmets Off marketing strategy going on right now. They're trying to humanize their players. So you may have noticed how they introduced the players one by one with pictures and names and hometowns at the start of the Super Bowl, and we saw the players again during certain commercial breaks when they were listing off the sponsors. So they're trying to make it personal. give the game a face, or faces, if you will.

And the NFL is doing that because it knows that the Super Bowl is a, quote, direct on-ramp to lifelong fandom. And it's interesting to note that one of the reasons the game is so addictive in the U.S. in particular, why it's the most watched sport, is in part because of its scarcity. The NFL's core regular season encompasses 17 games played across 18 weeks, compared with 82 games per season for the NBA and NHL, and 162 games for Major League Baseball.

Now, fans certainly don't watch every game. If you are a baseball fan, you're probably not watching 162 games. My wife and I do, but most people don't. But it's the scarcity of football that makes them watch every game, and therefore they become die-hard lifelong fans. Let's talk trends in this Super Bowl 60 for a moment. I believe there were 66 national spots available in the game. That means there were 66 commercials.

And if you do the math at $8 million a commercial, that is roughly $528 million in ad time revenue. Now, there's also sponsorship money and all sorts of other revenue sources going on, but the ads brought in $528 million minimum. Now, this year, 40% of the advertisers were new to the Super Bowl. They had never advertised in the Super Bowl before. There were quite a few AI ads from AI companies this year, which we'll talk about in a moment.

There weren't as many junk food ads this year, and junk food is a big part of the Super Bowl experience. Whereas health-related products and services were, increasing and had a bigger presence in the game this year, because there's been a cultural move towards health since the pandemic. There were more health care ads, five in total, than there were alcohol ads. There were only four alcohol ads in the game. The number of tech brands that advertised doubled since 2022. There were only four auto ads in the Super Bowl this year, off from a peak of 11 in 2018. And it looks to me.

me that the automakers might be choosing to spend their money at the Olympics and the World Cup, which is all happening around the same time, because I think those buys will be cheaper, but will also deliver big audiences. The Winter Olympics ad inventories completely sold out, by the way, and the World Cup, as of this writing, is 90% sold out. So I think a lot of advertisers that were usually in the Super Bowl spending big money have decided to spend their money elsewhere. There were a lot of celebrity ensembles this year in ads, meaning there were commercials with multiple celebrities in them.

There was a Ritz commercial that starred John Hamm, Scarlett Johansson, and Bowen-Yang, for example, which we'll talk about in a few moments. Last year, it's interesting to note that ads without celebrities outperform celebrity ads on return on investment, which might mean that we've hit celebrity saturation finally. There was also less diversity in ads this year, which is interesting because Bad Bunny performed the halftime show. And showing diversity in advertising is of course important.

Because the real risk for brands isn't taking a stand, it's ignoring the reality of the consumer. In other words, diversity is such a big part of an advertiser's target market, so not to reflect them is a risk. Here's a little bit of Super Bowl 60 trivia. Each team playing in the Super Bowl gets 108 footballs. 54 of those are for practice, and 54 are for the actual game. And here's another fun Super Bowl fact. Typically, 120 balls are used during the actual game. The additional ones are kicker footballs used for all kicking plays.

As a perk, every player in the big game gets a kick. Cadillac to drive around the host city in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl's halftime is twice as long as it is for a normal game. So that allows the performer to have a nice moment, but it also means that the teams have to stay warmed up inside the locker rooms for the game. They're sitting there longer than usual, which is interesting. Half-time performers do not get paid. Nobody gets paid anything, but of course it's worth tens of millions in exposure.

52.9% of Super Bowl viewers across Canada reportedly used food delivery apps such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub during the Super Bowl. So a lot of people are not cooking on Super Bowl day. And here's something I always wondered. NFL officials typically earn $12,000 per game. But during the Super Bowl, they earned between $30,000 and $50,000 a game. Interesting.

And here's a little trivia that'll make you feel old. Do you remember the wardrobe malfunction, Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson? That happened in 2004, 22 years ago. Hard to believe. And it was only last year when a micklebe commercial starred the wonderful Catherine O'Hara. We miss you already, Catherine. Of course, there were a lot of celebrities in this year's, Super Bowl, as there is every year.

Here's a partial list of the celebrities that appeared in ads this year. William Shatner, Ben Stiller, Benson Boone, Peyton Manning, Post Malone, George Clooney, Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neal, Laura Dern, Kurt Russell, Spike Lee, Sabrina Carpenter, Serino Williams, Matthew McConaughey, Bradley Cooper, Scarlett Johansson, Sophia Vergara, Olivia Spencer, Adrian Brody, Kendall Jenner, Emma Stone, and on and on. It was a long, long list of celebrities. This was kind of the AI Super Bowl in a way. AI companies have spent more than $1.7 billion on AI-related advertising this year, and they had a big presence in Super Bowl 60.

The Washington Post ran an article this week with the headline, Can these Super Bowl ads make Americans love something they don't like? That's a very interesting headline. So people are excited about AI but scared of it at the same time. So in this Super Bowl, there was an ad from Google Gemini, which showed the AI process helping a mom and her young son imagine a new home they were moving into. Chat GPT had an ad that helped a guy impress his new girlfriend with a menu item he could cook up in his apartment. AI service called Claude took a big square.

swing at the awkwardness of chat GPT. You know how when you ask chat GPT something, there's an awkward pause before it answers like a human. Well, they made a lot of fun of that in that ad. Meta had an AI ad saying that it creates jobs, which is a interesting and weird thing to say, because a lot of people fear that AI will take jobs away. And Jen Spark was an AI company that had Matthew Broderick as its spokesperson,

and its ad was all about how AI frees workers from tedious tasks. There was also an alcohol ad for Svedka vodka that was completely created with AI. And you see these kind of crazy-looking AI robots dancing to the Rick James song, Super Freak. It was the first fully AI-generated commercial in Super Bowl history. There were a couple of weird and outrageous ads, I thought, in the show this year, including one with William Shatner. He's 94 years old, so God bless William Shatner, still working, still in the Super Bowl, still relevant at 94, so good for him.

He was advertising Raisin brand cereal. So in this ad, he teleports a restaurant. the United States, reminding people to eat fiber-rich raisin brand to ensure regular trips to the toilet. Now, of course, this is a setup for lots of wordplay using an abbreviated version of Shatner's name. So he becomes Will Shat. So, Will Shat in the house. Will Shat on a car. Will Shat every day.

I think you get where that was going. So there's old William Shatner making fun of his name, trying to get people to have regular trips to the toilet. Pepsi had an interesting spot. They trolled Coke. So as you know, Coke has its famous polar bear advertising. Well, in this commercial, a polar bear is blindfolded and he does the taste test. And when he chooses the cola he prefers and takes his blindfold off, it's Pepsi.

So the Coke polar bear has chosen Pepsi. So you see the polar bear going through therapy because he can't pull leave he's chosen the Pepsi, and it kind of ends on a shot that was a parody of that astronomer incident that I talked about on a show a couple of weeks ago where the CEO and the head of human resources were caught at a coal play concert hugging each other by the kiss cam. This commercial ends with two polar bears being caught on the kiss cam hugging each other, but they're drinking Pepsi. So a little double trolling going on in that ad. The Ritz commercial I mentioned earlier.

Last year, they had an ad about having a salty personality with Aubrey Plaza and Michael Shannon, which I thought was funny. They were just proud of being so grumpy. That was the idea. This was an extension of that idea with John Hamm, Scarlett, Johansson, and Bowen-Yang. Except this one wasn't funny.

I just thought, you know what, it's not funny. The jokes are bad. And I wonder what the celebrities thought when they saw the script for this one. I'm sure they loved the checks for this one, but the script was not good. Don't go away. We'll be right back.

Manscape had quite the commercial. So there was a lot of toilet humor in commercials this year. I did spot an ad with singing toilet seats. There was a diarrhea ad, as well as the aforementioned Will Shat on a car ad. So Manscape dared to be even bolder. It had clumps of chest hair, beard hair, back hair, and I'm sure there was some lower extremity hair there,

and all those clumps of hair were scattered across bathrooms, and all the clumps of hair were singing. Once I danced upon your chest, covered your packs, I did my best. I was your scruff, your loyal friend, sworn to protect your dimple chin. But you stabbed me in the back. When you sliced me from the patch above your crack.

But with manscaped, I've met my demise since you've chopped me from between your eyes. And that bridge between your thighs. And the awkward part of your tries. Along with the humor, of the ads, there were a lot of emotional ads in the Super Bowl, which is always a tricky thing because everybody's there to see funny ads. That's really what everybody wants to see. So when you come charging in with an emotional ad, it has to be good because you're defying everyone's

expectations. The NFL ran a 60-second commercial. It opens with a young boy delivering a rousing speech to the toys in his bedroom, emphatically repeating the words, I am a champion. Then the scene transitions to a football field where we see the same boy, only he's in a helmet and uniform, and he's listening intently to a coach delivering the very same message. And that message is belief is a superpower. All right. Listen up. Today we face our toughest opponent.

They may be bigger, stronger, faster, fast. but I'll never surrender. Who am I? I am a champion. How unbreakable, unstoppable, unstoppable, unbelievable. Weakness will not be in my heart. Defeats will not be in my creed. Who am I? I'm a champion!

I'm a monster, a beast! No one will defy me or deny me. Who am I? I'm a champion. And then it was followed by Thank You Coaches, which appeared in all caps at the end of the commercial along with the NFL logo. Now, the NFL chief of marketing said, quote, there are a lot of things that people disagree about.

There's a lot of division in our country right now, but there are things that we can all agree on. The positive development of our children is one of them. Everyone can agree on that, and that unity is very important right now. So that was the philosophy behind that ad. The inspiration for the ad came from a real-life coach named Jonathan Flowers. He's a middle school coach in California, whose fiery locker room

pep talks have circulated online for over a decade now. And the I Am a Champion refrain was adapted from an actual pep talk from that coach, and he gave his permission to the NFL to use that speech in the commercial. And again, the ad is highly strategic. As mentioned earlier, the NFL sees the Super Bowl as its single biggest fan acquisition moment, with millions of casual fans watching, including the coveted audiences of young people, women and Latinos. And so they're hoping to turn those casual fans

into die-hard fans, and this is a great opportunity to get people excited about the game. As they say, the Super Bowl is a pathway to Lifetime NFL fandom. In another ad that was based on emotion, It was for the ring doorbell that, of course, has cameras attached to them. So this was a lost dog ad.

It said basically that for decades, the way we try and find lost dogs is to put a poster and a picture of the dog and staple it to a telephone pole. That's the standard way we all search for our lost dogs. This is Milo. Pets are family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years.

Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the neighborhood at ring.com. So I thought that was not only an interesting idea, but it was an interesting piece of technology.

And there was some research done about all the ads that had. had been released as of February 5th, and the Ring Lost Dog ad ranked first for emotion. Out of all the ads, and most of them were released ahead of time. I do have to say I didn't love any of the Super Bowl ads this year. Same feeling as I had last year. I liked some ads, but I didn't love any of them. My criteria always when looking at ads is, do I wish I had written it? And if I have that feeling, I know that I love that ad.

I did not have that feeling this year. I thought what I would do is list five ads that I liked. And I know there's a ton of pressure on advertising agencies when they have to come up with a Super Bowl ad. And I'm sure there are a lot of fingers in that pie, so it's hard to have a clean idea and protect it all the way to production because everybody's so nervous about it. And that's probably why a lot of ads never seem to click.

They seem to have their corners rounded off sometimes. or it doesn't quite work in a 30-second format. I think all of that happens because too many people are nervous about the ad. That said, here are five commercials that I liked. The first one is for Uber Eats. So this is an extension of last year's ad, which I thought was really good and really funny, where Matthew McConaughey believes that football was invented just to sell food,

which is such a funny premise. And they did it so well last year. So in this spot this year, He's trying to convince Bradley Cooper that the Super Bowl is only about food. And I think Matthew McConaughey is very funny in these commercials. I think he nails the whole thing. And here it is. When a quarterback runs, they call it a scramble.

You on a morning scramble, Bradley? Don't you have somewhere else to be? Think about it. Philgo Post, designed after a fork. That can't be true. Football is not selling food. You cannot keep this up. Players' names.

CJ Ham. Malik Ham. You're cherry picking. Girard cherry. Duron cherry. Oh, did you tell him about pancake blocks? Several times. Take a closer look, Mr. Bradley.

Tell me what do you see? Pro football Hall of Fame? It's a juicer. What? The Hall of Fame's a juicer, Bradley. Pick it out! It's all food, Bradley! Food, no, no, no, no.

No. You're never going to convince me that football's selling food. So what do you say we just squash this beef? Yeah, beef's food, so squash. You son of them. Burgers! When football makes you hungry, order Uber-Aids. Now, Matthew McConaughey may be right about the fact that the Super Bowl is all about food, because people watching the Super Bowl eat a massive amount of chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday

with projections hovering around 1.47 billion wings. If you can imagine that, Americans and Canadians, Canadians are expected to consume over 325 million gallons of beer on Super Bowl Sunday, and that is a massive amount of consumption, often totaling around 50 million cases of beer. And fans drink an average of four to eight beers during the game. Another ad I thought was kind of funny was for Hellman's mayonnaise, where Andy Samberg is doing his crazy imitation of Neil Diamond called Meal Diamond. and he's dancing around a restaurant squirting Helmand's mayo on various people's food, much to their horror, it seems, which is kind of funny.

And he's singing Sweet Caroline, only he's changed the words to be Sweet Sandwich Time. So it's just the craziness of Samberg that really makes the spot funny. I was born in this deli. My best friend was that bologna. That is until I'm... You had touching him, touching she. Oh, thank you. Yes!

Don't go away. We'll be right back. Every year, Budweiser does a Clydesdale horse ad. And as you may remember from last year, I was mentioning that many, many years ago, I think around the early 1930s, 1933 maybe, Budweiser used the eight horse hitch to take the first case of Budweiser. to the White House, to give it to Franklin Roosevelt for repealing prohibition. So that's the reason why Budweiser really celebrates that eight-horse wagon every year and uses the Clydesdales because it was a very important moment in their history.

So this year, there was an ad showing a young Clydesdale pony, and he happens to come across a little bird that's fallen out of its nest and they kind of become friends. And it turns out that as the horse gets older, so does the bird. They play with each other. The bird rides on his back. When it's pouring rain out, the horse stands over the little birds so he won't get wet. It's this wonderful little buddy story really done well.

And this baby bird turns out to be this glorious bald eagle when it finally matures. and it's a really well-done commercial. The ad is titled American icons because of the Clydesdale and, of course, the Eagle. This year is the 250th anniversary of the United States and the 150th anniversary of Budweiser. So this commercial is a tribute to that. The song that's used in the commercial is Free Bird by Leonard Skinnerd, which of course really elevates the commercial.

One note on music, by the way, there were so many expensive songs used in Super Bowl commercials this year, as there is every year, but a lot this year. And I always sit back and I think to myself that sometimes it's the amazing song that makes a mediocre commercial feel better than it really is. The fourth commercial, I like the idea, but I didn't really love the execution. It's a take on the original Jurassic Park. movie. So it reunites Sam Neal, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum from the original movie. And it

actually shows a clip from the actual film, a scene with Richard Attenborough and Samuel L. Jackson, when they realize the power has all gone out at Jurassic Park. And that, of course, is when all the chaos ensues. So when that happens in this commercial, the panic sets in, what are we going to do? The dinosaurs are going to get loose. All of that's going on. And suddenly this average guy walks into the frame from Xfinity, and he plugs in an Xfinity Internet broadband connection and saves everything, just very casually. He says, here you go, you just have to plug this in,

and suddenly everything powers up again, and catastrophe is diverted. That could have been bad. It was done well. They even used AI technology to make Sam Neal, Jeff Goldblum, and Laura Dern look young again to make them look like they did in the original film because they had to deliver new lines in this commercial.

So you saw a little AI at work there. That was Xfinity. The last commercial on my list is for Rocket Redfin. They are a real estate company merged with a mortgage company. This ad was unusual, and the extended version of it is worth seeing on YouTube. It showed Lady Gaga behind the scenes recording the theme song from Mr. Rogers' neighborhood called Won't You Be My Neighbor.

We see her with her producer trying different things. She's trying to figure out how she's going to handle the song vocally, how they're going to arrange it. It's kind of interesting to watch all that. And then she sings the most beautiful, touching, and emotional version of, Won't You Be My Neighbor? It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. A beautiful day for a neighbor.

you be mine, could you be mine? It's a neighborly day in this beauty would, a neighborly day for a beauty, would you be mine? Could you be mine? I thought that was an interesting take for a real estate company, and of course it's all about neighbors and neighborhoods, but it was more than that. I think it was a message of unity in a time where there's a lot of divisiveness going on. I think they were tapping very gently into a wonderful sentiment in that commercial. Anyway, those are my personal choices for the game and what I thought worked and didn't work.

While many publications now rank all the Super Bowl ads, it was USA Today that was the first to publish a list of the top ads, and it is that ranking that is the most watched to this day. And USA Today just released its list a few minutes ago. And here is the top 10, according to a poll of listeners. The top spot in the Super Bowl was the Budweiser story about the young Colt and the Eagle. This is the 10th time Budweiser has had the top commercial in the Super Bowl. Add number two was a commercial for lace potato chips called Last Harvest.

very sweet ad about a potato farmer retiring and giving the farm to his daughter to run. Ad number three on the list was Pepsi, the commercial with the polar bear choosing Pepsi over Coke. Number four was Duncan Donut. It was this crazy fake sitcom version of the movie Goodwill Hunting, starring Ben Affleck, Jason Alexander, Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Ted Danson, Jasmine, Jasmine Guy, and Tom Brady, a definite celebrity ensemble in that commercial. Commercial number five on the list was Mickelope Ultra, starring Kurt Russell, teaching a guy named Greg how to be a great skier, set to the song Eye of the Tiger. Add number six, Xfinity, the Jurassic Park parody.

Add number seven was for Novartis. Now, this commercial actually featured a number of real football players. The theme was, relax your tight end, and it was for a finger-free prostate test. Ad number eight was the NFL champion commercial I described earlier. Ad number nine, Bud Light, another celebrity pack commercial titled Keg, where a keg of Bud Light at a wedding mistakenly rolls down a hill and hilarity ensues. And the 10th ad on the USA Today Super Bowl top ads list was for Ring, the Find the Lost Dog ad I spoke of earlier.

So there you have the top Super Bowl commercials for 2026, and my list wasn't too far off the USA Today one. Hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm Terry O'Reilly.