Releasing Super Bowl Ads Early Is Bad for Super Bowl Ads

The power and influence of the Super Bowl make it much more than just a sports experience. For music fans, there’s the promised spectacle of the halftime concert show (only a relatively recent evolution). And for everyone watching, there are the commercials: Shiny new ads all aiming to use one of the most-viewed television events of the year to make an impact.

Super Bowl ads are traditionally celebrity-packed, loud, and outrageous. TV and movie casts reunite to sell cars or food delivery services. Goofy new mascots are introduced, while a classic one might be murdered to get our attention. It’s all a silly outcome of consumer culture, but also fascinating as an annual reflection of where this nation’s marketing dollars are going, such as during the so-called “Crypto Bowl.” And at the end of the day, sometimes it’s really cute when a lil horse delivers a keg of beer.

The prestige and exclusivity of the Super Bowl ad was once such a big deal that in 2006 (right as aspiring creators were discovering the power of digital video), Frito-Lay launched the annual Crash the Super Bowl contest. Amateur mad men got the chance to submit original Doritos spots that might air during the big game, for the honor of making it to the broadcast (as well as a hefty cash prize). The contest ran until 2016, and although it was resurrected for the 2025 game, Frito-Lay chose not to continue the revival for 2026. Still, some very fun ads emerged from that contest over the years — all welcome surprises.

Ad breaks during the Super Bowl used to promise something new. 364 days of the year, if you go outside or turn on your TV or look at your phone, you’re going to see at least one ad or commercial that you’ve seen at least once before. “At least once” is an understatement: A 2023 USC study found that people see roughly 5,000 ads every day, and not all of them can be new to you. Except during the Super Bowl, when even if the ad was a flop, it would be interesting.

Well, that used to be the case. Now, the January before the game has become the traditional time to start teasing, if not rolling out in full, the big ads planned for the game. Not every 2026 Super Bowl ad has already been released, but more than a dozen have, enough for publications like The Athletic and Ad Week to get a significant head start on their roundups and rankings. Consequence covered its first Super Bowl ad of the year on January 21st, two and a half weeks before the Big Game. Since then, Lady Gaga has teased a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood cover and Xfinity revealed its Jurassic Park reunion. And that’s barely scratching the surface.

The reason companies do this is for the same reason the monoculture itself is now an artifact of the past: the belief that there’s too much competition for our attention. The benefit is obvious: The earlier the release, the larger the opportunity for building buzz. Certainly there’s a benefit for advertisers in knowing that before the 30-second ad they’ve spent $8-10 million to broadcast hits the airwaves, they’ll be able to rack up tens of millions of views online. However, that only emphasizes the fact that an ad may not need the Super Bowl platforming to be a success — it just needs Sabrina Carpenter and some chips.

When Super Bowl ads become Christmas presents left unwrapped in the middle of the living room on December 15th, what’s lost is the joy of surprise, the thrill of the unexpected that transcends every carefully planned moment and promotion. In short, the moments that make live TV so much fun. Even a “teaser” for an ad still gives away too much.

Not only that, but these early releases feel like they’re increasingly devaluing the Super Bowl itself as a launching point. Last year’s game was watched by 127.7 million viewers according to Nielsen, the largest Super Bowl audience to date, and the largest audience in TV history for a single-network telecast in TV history” — making it one of the few events where people really do sit down to watch the whole thing. Yet it feels like the advertising industry is building towards a future where one of the year’s most culturally significant nights of the year gets reduced down to… Well, just a football game with a concert in the middle.

The commercials? You can just ignore those. You’ve seen them before.