Budweiser Delivers a Super Bowl Winner

With the Kansas City Chiefs back in the Super Bowl there’s been a lot of talk about dynasties and building sustained success. So it’s worth celebrating Super Bowl stars who are making their 50th anniversary appearance as part of the big game’s advertising. The Budweiser Clydesdales date from the end of Prohibition but they first showed up in a Super Bowl ad in 1975 and they’ve become synonymous with Budweiser commercials ever since.

The draft horses don’t show up in every Super Bowl ad for Budweiser but they’re never away for long. Back in the 2010s the combination of the horses and a puppy led to a trio of 5-Star ads which topped our Super Bowl rankings three years in a row. But while the public loved the ads, some industry voices expressed concern that their top-grade emotional storytelling outweighed the actual branding in the commercials.

“First Delivery”, Budweiser’s 2025 ad, gives you the best of both worlds. It’s a return to that heart-warming storytelling style but with the brand and product front-and-center alongside the Clydesdales. It stars a Clydesdale foal who is too small to pull the Budweiser cart, but gets his chance when a barrel breaks loose and rolls down the road. The little horse noses it on a perilous journey to its destination. It’s a tall tale well told with a great “horse walks into a bar” joke at the end to make sure the ad ends on an emotional peak (vital for effectiveness).

The result is an ad which already looks set to outperform most of its competitors at Super Bowl LIX, scoring 4.5-Stars on the Test Your Ad platform, predicting strong long-term potential for brand growth given the right investment. It also gets Exceptional ratings for short-term Spike, predicting a big Super Bowl sales spike. And it lands a strong 94% Brand Fluency score, well above the category average and putting to rest any worries that the heart-tugging storyline might be downplaying the branding element.

What’s more, these scores make this Budweiser’s most effective ad of the 2020s so far, a decade which has seen other Anheuser-Busch brands like Michelob ULTRA outperform their stablemate at the Super Bowl. Bud is back in contention, in a big way.

So what makes “First Delivery” so effective. The storytelling plays a huge part of course, but it’s also testimony to the power of creative consistency. With 50 years of Clydesdale branding, Budweiser have build up generations of recognition and goodwill for its draft horse mascots. They help create a powerful sense of heritage, harking back to old fashioned ways of beer delivery and making one of the nation’s biggest brands feel small and intimately connected to its customers lives. But they’re also an ongoing source of new stories and creative ideas, and “First Delivery” proves it.

As Super Bowl LIX approaches on Sunday, February 9, join us for an in-depth analysis of the ads airing during the biggest game – and the most anticipated advertising event – of the year.

Which ads will capture the public’s hearts? Will advertisers score big with exceptional brand-building strategies? How will brand recognition evolve? Will humor steal the show?

We’ll answer all these questions and more, plus reveal the top 10 ads of the event.