With the 2026 Super Bowl now firmly in the rearview mirror, it feels as though the advertising industry has finally had time to catch a breath after a frantic scramble to the finish line. However, for some, the Big Game’s creative has proven a source of inspiration, filling sails and encouraging a refreshed marketing approach for the months to come.
Such is the case for Kevin McHugh, chief strategy officer at Dentsu Creative Canada. A long-time fan of the event and keen analyst of its yearly implications, for him, the crucial takeaway was that as of this year, “joyful” creativity is back on the menu.
“Though celebrities and humour are pretty much an expectation, in the past few years they’ve been used as an escape from the negative news of the day,” he explains. “Last year, there was an undertone of nervousness to the humour. This year, everything felt warmer and more genuinely optimistic. Even the truly unhinged ads felt like they had a level of earnestness to them. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia talking, but it felt like agencies really met the expectations for fun that consumers have come to expect from Super Bowl advertisements.”
This trend carried over between both the Canadian and US marketing endeavours. While regional-specific brands and varying levels of budget inevitably meant the executions had some degree of diversity, this sense of positivity, Kevin notes, was pervasive… even if not inherently innovative.
Notably, given that the Super Bowl is such a “tense moment for advertisers”, it seemed as though many agencies accepted the trade off between being breakthrough and managing the risk of doing something different. Tried and true ingredients such as celebrities and recognisable brand characters were largely at play once again. But, the CSO emphasises, the application of these components did feel different this year.
“[In the US], Anthropic used humour to address a contentious concern about AI advertising, and Budweiser had a new take on its Clydesdales with the addition of a new character, Lincoln the Bald Eagle,” he says. “Having a level of awareness of what consumers care about, what they recognise and what they internalise is important to creating an effective Super Bowl ad (otherwise it can come off as too ‘inside baseball’, where the message or idea feels relevant to a select few who understand the context). Marketers did a great job this year finding that balancing act.”
Similarly fresh was the implementation of AI. Relative to years past, where “AI was more of an underlying thematic”, Kevin observed that here, it was a much more central element, serving equally as a product, creative device and a punchline itself. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean execution was flawless across the board.
At a time when there still is a lot of uncertainty around this technology, the CSO found that the ads which relied on AI exclusively for execution were “shining examples” of its creative limitations. Meanwhile, the work which sold or offered a point of view about AI were more focused on setting the groundwork for what their brands were against, versus what they stood for.
As such, the businesses that did it best overall were the ones that embraced classic practices like brand storytelling and nostalgia, seizing the moment as a meaningful culmination of their prior marketing efforts.
“Google stood out as a brand that took advantage of this,” says Kevin, speaking on the former. “It’s best known for its product-forward ads throughout the year, but it used the Super Bowl as a moment to build emotional resonance around Gemini. By showing how AI can support life transitions through creativity and human connection, Google struck a balance between genuine emotional storytelling and a clear illustration of how the product fits naturally into people’s lives.”
As for the latter, he attributes the return of this tactic to the ongoing turbulent times, providing something “inherently comforting and familiar” at a time when a psychological buffer is needed most. Describing it as a “shortcut to attention” – provided it was paired with a clear brand message and executed authentically – this would prove a unifying theme in several of his favourite ads of the year.
“In the US, Dunkin’s faux sitcom ad stood out as a great example of a brand that knows its most valuable audience – elder millennials,” Kevin continues. “Using the tried-and-true ingredients of a Super Bowl ad, it created something that not only hit all the feels, but had replay value after the Big Game. And in Canada, finance brands took centre stage. TD’s spot on the digital future felt disarming, while our very own work for Fidelity Investments reframed what financial freedom looks like.”
To this end, the team at Dentsu Creative Canada recognises there’s major learnings to be reinforced by the 2026 Super Bowl, especially in a year with massive sporting events such as the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, and upcoming FIFA World Cup. While Kevin caveats that in some ways, the Super Bowl is an outlier, given just how resource-intensive its ads are, he affirms that internally, best practices like repeating branded devices, telling a memorable story, and having a clear brand role are the tickets to Dentsu Creative Canada’s future success.
“Despite the growing risk of fragmented attention, unchecked technology and media fatigue, advertisers can still fall back on some enduring truths that will continue to be effective in sporting events and beyond,” he concludes. “Technology cannot replace shared human experience, like humour, pain and wit, and in environments where attention is increasingly hard to get and maintain, stopping people in their tracks is more impactful than repeating the same thing over again.
“At the end of the day, the most effective ads – big or small – need to understand and be empathetic to the people they’re selling to. The brands that were able to do that this Super Bowl were the most successful.”