For decades, the Super Bowl commercial represented a singular achievement. A brand earned its place on the biggest stage, delivered a perfectly crafted piece of film, and waited for Monday morning verdicts on memorability, humor, and cultural impact.

Spending millions on an ad and airtime is easy. Earning action is the hard part.

Production quality is no longer a variable. 8K resolution, AI-assisted cinematography, celebrity access, and cinematic storytelling are now table stakes. Visual polish is the baseline, not the differentiator. As brands prepare to spend $8 million or more for a 30-second window, the economics demand more. 

The question facing marketers is no longer whether the ad looks good, or whether anyone laughs. It is whether they have built beyond the singular moment and ad spot. If you have developed a Super Bowl ad, have you also invested in the ecosystem around that ad to ensure a flawless consumer experience? That shift starts with how the game is actually watched.

Attention still centers on the television, but it rarely stays there. According to post-game reports from 2025, more than 70% of Super Bowl viewers now engage with a second screen during the broadcast. The commercial airs. The phone comes up. Whatever happens next matters more than ever.

When Reach Outpaces Readiness

The Super Bowl still delivers reach that no other media moment can match. 

For years, awareness functioned as a reliable proxy for demand. Broad exposure lifted consideration over time. Mass reach was trusted to work its way through the funnel. In the modern media environment, that time has condensed. Consumers might engage with your brand instantly, entering the ecosystem, learning more, or even converting within seconds of the ad. 

As Michael Kania, Associate Vice President at Kepler, puts it:

"The Super Bowl is the ultimate upper-funnel play, but awareness is just the ignition. The broadcast spot creates unprecedented traffic and brand affinity; the broader campaign builds the off-ramp. If that $8 million investment doesn't fuel an engine that runs beyond the game, you’re paying for people to drive right past you and you’re just a distant memory on a road trip.” 

Roughly 82% of TV ad-driven searches during the Super Bowl now happen on mobile devices, often within moments of a spot airing. Viewers do not simply absorb the message. They check it. They search it. They look for a next step.

When that next step is unclear, or the audience is misaligned, attention disappears as fast as it arrived.

This concept was taken to the extreme by Coinbase in 2022. They spent $14 million to display nothing more than a bouncing QR code, generating 20 million scans in a single minute and crashing their app in the process.

By 2026, the lesson has landed. The Super Bowl is no longer treated as a standalone achievement. It is the front door to something much bigger.

When Behavior Becomes the Measure

That shift has forced a reevaluation of creative success itself.

Within creative teams, there is growing skepticism toward work that peaks on broadcast and disappears by halftime. Attention still matters, but behavior has become the more honest signal.

“The game has evolved beyond merely hiring a celebrity and a drone pilot,” says Johan Vakidis at Sid Lee. “This tells me that creative thinking has to move beyond what is seen on screen. It is about what the work drives. If the user is not reaching for their phone to engage, remix, or enter a brand ecosystem within seconds of the spot, you have not built a campaign. You have just filmed a short movie.”

That view reflects how the Super Bowl now works in practice. The broadcast creates the spark. The evaluation starts immediately after.

With second-screen behavior now the norm, the phone has become the primary site of intent. Creative that anticipates that reality consistently outperforms work that treats the spot as the finish line.

Ads that include a clear digital call to action generate significantly stronger engagement than pure brand awareness executions. DoorDash’s 'All the Ads' stunt proved that gamification can essentially hijack the broadcast. By forcing viewers to decode a complex promo code, they drove 8 million entries, and turned a 30-second spot into 11.9 billion earned PR impressions.

The results of this interactive shift are hard to ignore. 

 According to Cloudflare data, TurboTax and Poppi saw post-spot traffic spikes of 24,875% and 7,329%, respectively, following their Super Bowl appearances. In 2025, T-Mobile generated 12.6x the online engagement of the average Super Bowl advertiser. Dunkin’ saw similar downstream impact with its DunKings campaign, translating broadcast attention into social momentum and the highest sales day in the brand’s history the day following the Super Bowl.

The pattern is consistent. The broadcast creates attention. The system around it determines outcomes.

Redefining the Big Moment

Taken together, these dynamics point to a quiet redefinition of the Super Bowl’s role.

The game still anchors culture. The commercial still signals ambition. What has changed is how value is created around the moment.

In a game where a single second of airtime costs roughly $266,000 and reaches close to 191 million unique viewers, efficiency has become the defining variable.

The strongest Super Bowl work in 2026 is designed as an ecosystem rather than a standalone expression. The spot initiates the experience. Mobile, search, and platform behaviors carry it forward. Clear paths convert attention into action.

The Big Spot remains powerful.

Its impact now depends on what it sets in motion.