Why Consistency Wins the (Big) Game
Every year, the Super Bowl brings a fresh set of ads to our screens, with marketers hoping to cement theirs as classics to be remembered for years to come. There are many approaches to Big Game creative:
- Wacky: 2025’s Mountain Dew ad featuring singer Seal as a….seal
- Heartfelt: 2020’s “Loretta” from Google and 2023’s “Saving Sawyer” from Amazon
- Funny: Snickers casting Betty White for its 2010 “You’re not you when you’re hungry” masterpiece
- Nostalgic: Jeep resurrecting Groundhog Day, featuring Bill Murray and the famous groundhog
- Musical: T. Mobile’s multi-year campaign featuring Zach Braff and Donald Faison or Cheetos’ “Can’t Touch This” with MC Hammer
- Surprising: Beyoncé’s feature in the 2024 Verizon commercial, which was immediately followed by the release of “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages”
- And many more!
It’s true that the Super Bowl will always be a home for new creative. Only a handful of brands have repurposed or re-aired older creative for game night (like Tecovas this year). That being said, it’s important that new creative, built for one of the world’s biggest stages, still feels familiar. Distinctive. On brand.
In this blog, we’re breaking down the consistency winners from Super Bowl 2026. The brands that didn’t deviate from but further leaned into their creative platforms. That stuck to what they do best and further elevated it. Rather than trying to reinvent themselves to create buzz and intrigue, these brands doubled down on who they are and what they stand for.
The payoff? System1 and Effie’s book, The Creative Dividend, unlocks just how important consistency is to profitable growth, which we’ll also recap here. Let’s explore the consistency champions and why it’s your brand’s best long-term bet.
How to Achieve Consistency in Super Bowl Advertising
There’s more than one way to be consistent. Different brands approach it in the way that works best for them. Here, we’ll highlight 6 strategies that can bring your brand quickly to mind and deliver commercial impact.
1. Feature your character fluent device again and again
For 48 years, the beer brand has featured its beloved Clydesdales alongside other distinctive brand assets. A long-term commitment to a recurring fluent device not only helps signal who the ad is for, it also elicits positive feeling in viewers who have come to know and love these characters.
NERDS is another example of this in action. While Andy Cohen was a new addition, the giant gummy and the tiny candy characters have appeared in three consecutive Super Bowl spots to promote the Gummy Clusters product line.
2. Leverage the same celebrity spokespersons
Is it really a Super Bowl without Ben Affleck and Jen? Wait, not that Jen! This year Dunkin’ brought back its longtime collaborator Ben Affleck, plus Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc and Jason Alexander. Affleck’s fourth Super Bowl appearance for the brand once again delivered the laughs. While the scenarios change – Ben working a drive-thru, Ben performing a song with Matt Damon and Tom Brady, Ben and brother Casey working the table at an autograph signing – Affleck is the familiar yet quirky spokesperson who continues to promote his love for the coffee chain. Dunkin’ continually scores exceptional on System1’s Spike Rating (short-term sales potential) and has now made more Super Bowl appearances than Zach Braff and Donald Faison have for T. Mobile home internet (oh, how we miss them!).
Another example of consistency with spokespeople is Bud Light. After appearing in last year’s neighborhood-themed spot, Post Malone, Shane Gillis and Peyton Manning returned. This time, they’re chasing after a runaway keg at a wedding. Cheers to a brand that’s not afraid to stick with an entertaining trio year after year. We hope to see them in 2027!
3. Keep your season-long creative platform going
Some brands advertise throughout the NFL season, then turn up at the game with creative that neither looks or feels familiar. Meanwhile, Uber Eats has stayed consistent all season long, for two seasons straight. Its “Football is for Food” creative platform remains the same, with the flexibility to bring additional celebs into the mix. What started as a 2024 conspiracy theory around football existing to sell food, featuring Matthew McConaughey, has expanded to include Bradley Cooper and Parker Posey, all the while laddering up to the same theme with new jokes and scenarios.
4. Or the one you leveraged at the last Big Game
Last year, Lay’s topped System1’s rankings with a sweet story set on the farm to reinforce its homegrown roots. The brand continued to leverage the ad even up until a month before the Super Bowl. This year, we’re back on a family-owned farm with another heartwarming story, this one featuring a father retiring and passing on the keys to his daughter to run the business.
Hellmann’s also leaned into a consistent and clear sense of place. Last year’s When Harry Met Sally reunion brought Billy Chrystal and Meg Ryan back to Katz’s Deli. This year’s “Meal Diamond” spot featuring Andy Samberg brings us back to a deli for a “Sweet Caroline” sing-along. Each year, Hellmann’s has landed a strong 4-Star score and exceptional short-term sales potential.
5. Stay true to your purpose
There aren’t many purpose-driven ads in the Super Bowl, partly because it wouldn’t feel authentic to turn up with purpose messaging if your brand hasn’t built this reputation prior to the Big Game. For purpose to work, it requires continually showing up to highlight the causes your brand cares about and how it is helping.
Take Dove and the NFL as examples. For years, Dove has made a commitment to girls’ self esteem and participation in sports, not just through its advertising but through a wider brand platform: the Dove Self-Esteem Project. This year’s ad highlighted the fact that many young girls quit sports because they are criticized for their body type and showcased the joy of girls’ sports.
The Power of Consistency in Advertising
These Super Bowl ads and others are clear examples of consistency and its benefits. But there are many ways in which brands can be consistent, as explored by System1 and Effie in the recently published The Creative Dividend.
The book is an in-depth look at how advertising pays back and introduces the Creativity Stack, four key pillars that support creative quality to drive brand and business effects. These are emotion, distinctiveness, showmanship and consistency. Our blog breaks down every layer.
Here, we’ll focus in on consistency.
The Compound Creativity framework measures consistency holistically by assessing how creatively consistent a brand is over multiple years and assigns a Compound Creativity Score. It captures strategy, execution across channels, and what a brand chooses to keep the same or change. This fuller view helps marketing teams create more consistent, effective advertising.
The Compound Creativity Score is derived from how well brands perform across three areas:
The research assigned Compound Creativity Scores for 139 US and UK brands and matched them to campaigns in Effie Insights’ database. This revealed that:
- Consistent Creative Foundations help a brand become more talked about, more trusted, more differentiated, and more distinctive.
- And brands that make fewer creative team changes produce advertising that is more emotional and more distinctive year-on-year.
- Brands with a high Culture of Consistency are more likely to report gains in distinctiveness and differentiation.
- But the biggest payoff is related to trust: no campaigns from low consistency brands report trust gains, compared with 11.2% from high-consistency brands.
- Consistent Creative Execution: When a brand is consistent across its foundations and execution, its advertising becomes more emotional and more distinctive. Plus, gains accumulate over time as each exposure strengthens memory structures.
Get Inspired by Consistency in the Super Bowl
When we look at each pillar of Compound Creativity, there plenty of examples by which to be inspired.
- Consistent Creative Foundations: Plenty of Super Bowl advertisers have longstanding relationships with their creative agencies. These include the NFL and 72andSunny, Hellmann’s and VML, Lay’s and Highdive and Dove and Ogilvy.
And many have also used the Big Game as an opportunity to showcase consistent positioning and creative ideas, like Snickers’ ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’ featuring Betty White, Skittles’ ‘Taste the Rainbow’ leaning into the wacky and Cheetos reinforcing itself as the beloved messy orange snack.
- Culture of Consistency: Lay’s aired its “Little Farmer” Super Bowl LIX spot into 2026, committing to creative wear in. Meanwhile, Hellmann’s, Uber Eats and Coors Light pair their TV spots with cinema, digital and out-of-home media buys and Michelob Ultra, WeatherTech and Manscaped lean hard into showmanship advertising that entertains the masses.
- Consistent Creative Execution: There’s not a conversation about fluent device and celebrity tenure without Budweiser’s Clydesdales and Dunkin’ and Affleck. State Farm also makes sure that Jake turns up in every ad.
With regards to consistent brand assets, when Reese’s turns up in the Big Game, it always remembers to go big and bold with orange, while T. Mobile brings splashes of pink. As for a consistent tone of voice, Bud Light always leans into humor and party culture while Dove opts for a supportive and nurturing approach.
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®.