With a 30-second Super Bowl ad spot now commanding an upwards of $8 million price tag, the pressure on brands to deliver has never been higher. In a media landscape defined by fractured attention and skippable content, the big game remains one of the last true monocultural events. But as costs skyrocket, the central question for every CMO becomes unavoidable: How can you possibly ensure that massive investment pays off?
The answer, it turns out, has less to do with spectacle and celebrity cameos and more to do with a measurable, universal human response. We spoke with Vanessa Chin, SVP of Marketing at effectiveness firm System1, whose insights are drawn from a database of over 150,000 tested ads and detailed in their annual report, How to Win the Super Bowl – 2025. With over two decades of experience on both the brand side at ALDI and the agency side at Leo Burnett, Chin has seen what works—and what doesn't—from every angle.
Choosing happiness: "Through our research, we find the strongest correlation to market share growth is tied to the amount of happiness and positive emotions you have for the ad," Chin said. This isn't just a feeling; it's a quantifiable metric. While a typical ad scores between a 2.2 and 2.4 on System1's "star rating," the average Super Bowl spot scores a 3.0, making it quantifiably better at driving long-term growth.
But according to Chin, achieving that score requires a disciplined approach. "There isn't just one path to success." The first step to an emotional payoff is simple recognition, or what System1 calls "fluency." Chin points to the Budweiser Clydesdales as the prime example of a "fluent device"—a familiar brand asset that does the heavy lifting before the story even begins.
The recognition effect: "There's something that happens when you recognize the brand. It opens you up to feel really positive emotions because you recognize it, you know it, you've got warm feelings towards it, and it also gives you that freedom to feel more intensely," she explained. This principle also applies to celebrities; the most effective ads cast stars in their well-known public personas, which feels authentic and emotionally resonant.
A Super Bowl ad shouldn't be an island; it should be the climax of a larger story. Chin highlights the UberEats "conspiracy" campaign as a case study in playing the long game, where they seeded the idea months in advance during the regular football season.
The Big Game long game: "What was so magical about this campaign, and why it performed so well, is that it had a big idea that was already seeded before you even got to the Super Bowl," Chin noted. This strategy informs her direct advice to brands: release your ad early. The Super Bowl is a social event, and pre-exposure turns viewers into participants who discuss the ad, a dynamic their data confirms as "scores do increase if you've seeded it early."
Courage to go big: Chin explained that the Super Bowl can serve as a launchpad for a brand's creative transformation, pointing to brands like WeatherTech and Häagen-Dazs that pivoted from purely functional advertising to broader, emotional storytelling. "The Super Bowl gives brands the courage to go big, to get out of performance marketing, and into storytelling, to bring on the show and bring on the entertainment," she said. The success of a single, ambitious Super Bowl ad can give a company the confidence to adopt a new creative strategy for the long term.
For every success, there are costly fumbles. Chin identified two primary pitfalls. The first is a crisis of anonymity. In the quest to be creative, some brands are becoming unrecognizable, with brand recall dropping from 85% to 79% over the last five years. The reason? "That's just a lot for a human being to unpack and catch up" when a brand strays too far from its core assets, Chin said. The second sin is the misuse of negative emotion. While taking viewers on what Chin calls an "emotional roller coaster" is a powerful technique, the ride must end well. Brands that leave viewers with unresolved feelings of fear or sadness are making a critical error. "If you essentially pass on this problem and have the viewer hold it at the end of the work, that is going to be problematic for you," she warned.
Ultimately, the difference between a worthwhile investment and an expensive mistake comes down to a simple formula. Media spend alone has a weak (0.25) correlation to market share growth. But when you combine that spend with high creative effectiveness, the correlation skyrockets to an undeniable 0.83. That effectiveness isn't guesswork; it’s validated by pre-testing the ad with real audiences to ensure the creative resonates before the multi-million dollar media buy.
