America’s Favorite Super Bowl LX Ads
The Super Bowl isn’t just one night. It’s months and months of planning, producing and finetuning for brands and agencies. It’s a teaser-filled January, and for brands that want to maximize the visibility of their creative, there’s even early releases of game-day spots. And every year, System1 tests every Big Game ad with consumers, measuring their emotional responses to determine which are America’s favorites, and in turn, which will have the most commercial impact.
This year wasn’t just the 60th milestone anniversary of the game, it was the first time spots sold for up to $10 million, putting even more pressure on brands to perform at their highest level. It was a Super Bowl filled with returning favorites like Lay’s, Pepsi, State Farm, Budweiser and Uber Eats, newcomers including Grubhub, Rippling, Tecovas and Kinder Bueno. It was a stage for B2C and B2B brands, a space for recurring brand characters, celebrities who are major household names as well as creators.
So, we know the end result of the game, but how did the ads perform? We’re breaking down America’s favorite Super Bowl ads, including key stats and themes to help you understand what makes an ad win with audiences and grow your brand over the long term.
How We Measure Ad Effectiveness
Before we dive into our post-game analysis, it’s worth a quick refresher on our methodology.
Our Test Your Ad Competitive Edge platform measures consumers’ emotional responses as they watch an ad, including happiness, surprise, neutrality, sadness, fear, disgust, anger and contempt. Understanding the type of emotion elicited allows us to predict long-term market share growth. This is expressed as the Star Rating.
The long-term growth potential for each Star bracket is:
- 1.0 to 1.9 = Low
- 2.0 to 2.9 = Modest
- 3.0 to 3.9 = Good
- 4.0 to 4.9 = Strong
- 5.0 to 5.9 = Exceptional
Next, we measure how intensely people feel these emotions and the speed of processing the brand to deliver a Spike Rating that predicts short-term sales effects. Finally, we assess the percentage of people who correctly identified the brand after watching the entirety of the ad. This results in the Fluency Rating.
Ad Performance at a Glance
The Super Bowl is one of the biggest platforms in the US, enabling brands to get in front of millions of people on an occasion when many are actually excited to watch ads. In a world of skippable media, ads can often be viewed as a nuisance and the ‘stuff’ in-between sought-after content. On Super Bowl Sunday, the ads are part of the fun and the conversation. And if they’re epic enough, they’re remembered for years, even decades.
The smartest marketers understand that the Super Bowl isn’t just an opportunity to drive short-term sales the night of the game and in the weeks following. It’s also about cementing your brand into memory, especially with those who do not yet purchase from you. To accomplish this, your creative needs to be entertaining, emotive, distinctive and ideally also consistent with past work.
To realize market share growth and profit gain, creative must drive a positive emotional response in viewers and be remembered by them. Because of the major impact these long-term effects can have on brands, our lead Super Bowl ad ranking is determined by the advertisers that scored highest on our Star Rating. We’re also breaking down the best ads according to our Spike Rating (short-term sales potential) and Fluency Rating (strength of branding).
Before we dive into the rankings, let’s take a look at how all the ads performed on Star.
This year, all Super Bowl ads averaged 2.7 Stars, a slight dip from last year’s 3.0-Star average. What’s the root cause of this? More tech ads in the Big Game, which underperformed according to the category average. Eighteen percent of ads featured AI messaging, averaging 2.1 Stars.
The Effectiveness Winners of 2026
Now, let’s review the biggest brand-building winners of Super Bowl LX. Because these are ranked according to Star Rating and based on the type of emotional response, with happiness being the most positively weighted, we can consider these America’s favorite Super Bowl ads of 2026.
Where Star is equal in the list, we defer to the Spike Rating (short-term sales potential).
1. NFL (72andSunny), You Are Special — 5.9 Stars
2. NFL (72andSunny), Champion — 5.7 Stars
3. Budweiser (BBDO New York), American Icon — 5.6 Stars
4. Universal Orlando Resort (Lucky Generals), Lil’ Bro— 5.3 Stars
5. Michelob Ultra (Wieden+Kennedy New York), The ULTRA Instructor — 5.1 Stars
6. Ring (in house, Miniac and Bemo), Search Party from Ring – 4.5 Stars
7. Pepsi (PepsiCo Content Studio and BBDO), The Choice — 4.2 Stars
8. Red Bull (Kastner), Dog Date — 4.2 Stars
9. Lay’s (Highdive),The Lay’s Challenge — 4.1 Stars
10. Hellmann’s (VML), Meal Diamond — 4.1 Stars
Super Bowl Creative Themes
What did the top ads have in common? We’re taking a closer look at the recurring themes of the night.
- Star Power is a Shortcut, Not a Strategy: Seven of this year’s top 10 ads didn’t need star power to entertain audiences, yet 61% of the commercials cast celebrities. Often, the ads relied on two, three, four or even more celebrities to do the heavy lifting. Star power can create buzz and short-term sales potential, but it won’t build your brand in the long term.
- Pop Culture Plays Well: Celebrities get a lot of the Super Bowl buzz, but some of the smartest ads are the ones which can tap into a cultural moment or land a nostalgic reference. The NFL’s recreation of a classic Mr. Rogers song is one great example, and Pepsi used its rival’s distinctive assets against it, judo style, with some very familiar polar bears suffering an identity crisis when they realize they prefer Pepsi. Hellmann’s surreal “Meal Diamond” was one of the most effective, and funniest, pop culture references.
- Consistency Keeps Entertaining: Red Bull brought back its hand-drawn animation style with a new story centered around two dogs on a date, Hellmann’s continued to solidify its standing as a deli staple and Pepsi revived the Pepsi Challenge in a fresh way. Michelob Ultra once again played into sports to highlight that consumers don’t have to choose between a beer and an active lifestyle. Budweiser continued to invest in its fluent device, the Clydesdales, to land another 5-Star classic.
Create with Confidence®
Want the full list of Super Bowl rankings? Access them and download the full Test Your Ad reports in our Test Your Ad Competitive Edge database. Featuring 100,000+ ads, it’s your resource for comparing and benchmarking your creative against the wider category so you can Create with Confidence®.