I’m Watching the Big Game. I Don’t Know the Rules. That’s the Point.

Every year, one of the largest live attention events on the planet unfolds. Millions tune in. Not all of them know the rules. Not all of them care who wins. 

And that’s exactly why moments like the Super Bowl are such a powerful test of innovation. 

The biggest Super Bowl memory of my life didn’t happen on the field. 
It happened on Twitter. In the dark. With a cookie. 

Oreo’s “Dunk in the Dark” tweet remains, for me, the most memorable Super Bowl moment of all time. Which immediately tells you two things about me. One: I am not a sports person. Two: I am, without question, an elder millennial. 

But it also tells you something more useful. That moment didn’t succeed because viewers were deeply engaged experts. It worked because it landed instantly, without explanation, in the middle of shared, distracted attention. 

That is the condition innovation most often faces in the real world. 

Attention Is the Constraint, Not the Opportunity

This weekend, millions of people will be watching the game without tracking stats, understanding formations, or caring who wins. They will be scrolling, chatting, refilling drinks, and glancing up when something cuts through. 

This is not distracted attention. It is normal attention. 

And it is the condition under which most products, packaging, and ideas are encountered every day. 

System1’s Creative Dividend research reinforces this reality. Across categories and markets, it shows that ideas which generate an immediate emotional response dramatically outperform those that rely on rational explanation. Not because they are louder or flashier, but because they work with how the brain actually processes information. 

Emotion comes first. Meaning follows if it’s earned.Yet innovation is often designed as if people are fully focused, motivated, and willing to do the work of understanding. As if clarity can be deferred. As if impact can be explained later. 

At scale, it can’t. Ideas don’t get a warm-up lap. What people take away is often formed in seconds, and it hardens quickly. 

The Audience That Reveals the Truth

The most revealing audience isn’t the superfan. It’s the one who shows up anyway. They didn’t plan for the moment. They arrived through proximity and social gravity. They don’t bring expertise, but they bring honesty. 

This audience doesn’t fill in gaps. They don’t infer intent. They don’t reward effort. 

They respond to what’s immediately visible. 

Does this make sense? 
Does it feel relevant? 
Does it spark anything at all? 

When innovation fails here, it doesn’t fail loudly. It simply disappears. And as the Creative Dividend shows, disappearing emotionally is often the same as disappearing commercially. 

Innovation Is More Than Advertising

Because of moments like this, innovation is often mistaken for execution. For the ad, the launch, the reveal. But by the time something is live, the most important decisions have already been made. 

Innovation lives in early signals. In structure, design, naming, and format. In the cues that tell people how to feel about something before they’ve processed what it is. 

Those cues are always being read, whether you test them or not. Test Your Innovation exists to make that reading visible. Rather than evaluating finished work, it focuses on the elements that do the quietest but most critical work. Concepts. Visual systems. Product cues. Early-stage ideas. 

It’s built on the same insight at the heart of the Creative Dividend: that emotional response is not a “nice to have,” it’s a leading indicator of effectiveness. The question isn’t whether people will eventually understand an idea. It’s whether they feel anything at all when they first encounter it. 

Designing for Instinct, Not Explanation

When you remove expertise, you remove rationalization. 

People don’t explain ideas to themselves. They react. They feel clarity or confusion. Interest or indifference. Meaning or noise. This isn’t a limitation of the audience. It’s the operating system. 

Designing for instinct means understanding which elements create immediate emotional traction, and which introduce friction that no amount of media spend can overcome later. 

Test Your Innovation captures those first impressions while there is still time to act on them. Before assumptions calcify. Before launch turns hypotheses into liabilities. It doesn’t promise certainty. It reduces blind spots. And as the Creative Dividend demonstrates, reducing emotional blind spots is often where the biggest commercial gains are hiding. 

A Different Way to Watch

So this weekend, I’ll be watching the game the way I always do. Without expertise. Without allegiance. For snacks, Halftime and ads. 

And that’s precisely why I’ll be paying attention to what actually lands. The ideas that explain themselves. The innovations that don’t ask for effort. The moments that spark feeling before thought. 

I’m still thinking about a cookie tweet from over a decade ago, because it required nothing from the audience and left something behind. 

Enjoy the show. #GoSports

Test Innovation Where Attention Is Real

Most ideas don’t meet a focused, expert audience. They meet distracted, instinctive humans.

Test Your Innovation shows you what those first seconds really deliver. By capturing immediate emotional response, it helps you spot which ideas spark feeling, which fade into noise, and where to refine before launch turns assumptions into risk.

See emotion in action. Find the ideas that truly connect.
Refine with expert guidance and move forward with confidence.