Super Bowl LX and the Bad Bunny Halftime Show

With over 124m viewers tuning in this year, Super Bowl LX was the second-most-watched game in Super Bowl history. A common conversation topic was the prevalence of ads featuring AI in some fashion – so we took a deeper look to see how the ad lineup stacked against benchmarks.

Nearly 20% of ads mentioned or featured AI such as Anthropic (Claude), Ring and OpenAI. In particular the Ring ad stood out, with many calling out the ‘search party’ feature as a mass-surveillance capability hidden behind a heartwarming use case featuring finding a lost pet.

Compared to the breakdown from the 2013 telecast, Automotive ads were down (-8.8%) while CPG (13.3%) and Online Services ads (+18.0%) were up significantly. From a creative perspective, there were more inspirational (+12.7%) and celebrity / athlete (+10.7%) spots in 2026.

Interestingly, the proportion of TV promos was much lower than our benchmark year (-27.6%) which is in alignment with the media landscape’s shift towards streaming content. Movie promos though were up slightly (6.9%), as distributors seek to bolster their box office results.

Overall, those who suspected they were seeing a lot of AI ads were indeed correct! We’ll be keeping an eye out on future special events to see if the trend continues as we venture further into 2026!