Monday morning’s enewsletter from Marketing Innovation included a poll that asked a simple question: Did you like the Super Bowl 2026 ads?
If Monmouth College students in professor Tom Prince’s “Introduction to Marketing” class had completed the poll, their majority response from the three options would’ve been “Eh. They were OK.”
But that’s not to say that the students didn’t have their favorite commercials — opinions that they shared during what has become an annual discussion by Prince about advertising’s biggest day of the year.
The students mostly agreed with the ranking of the commercials by USA Today, which is a consumer-based poll. Prince also revealed the rankings by Ad Age, which is drawn from critical reviews. The contrast is similar to the People’s Choice Awards and the Golden Globes for determining the best of television and movies.
A thirst for first
Many of Prince’s students selected commercials by Budweiser and Lay’s among their top-ranked ads, a pairing that USA Today had ranked Nos. 1 and 2. The Bud ad featured an eaglet and a pony growing up together to become a soaring eagle and a Clydesdale or, as referred to in the ad’s title, a pair of “American Icons.”
But that commercial success did not come cheaply, Prince noted.
“Budweiser’s cost was estimated to be about $30 million,” he said. “This year, Super Bowl ads cost about $8 million per 30 seconds, and Budweiser’s ad was one minute. They also paid somewhere between $1-5 million to license the song ‘Free Bird'” (the epic rock anthem by Lynryd Skynyrd).
“That’s a lot of money to spend on an eagle and a horse riding across a field,” continued Prince. “Did it work? Was it worth it?”
Prior to the big game, he screened the commercial for his wife, who loved the ad and wanted to see it again. For Prince, he admitted, “It took me a while” to be as impressed.
Emotional appeals
Lay’s went the same direction with its ad “Last Harvest,” featuring a father handing over the keys to his potato farm to his daughter, who had tagged along with him every step of the way through the years.
“I asked a few people about that ad, which is about American farms, family farms,” said Prince. “One of them said, ‘I started to cry when I saw that ad.’ Emotional appeals, when done well, still have a positive effect on consumers.”
While 1973’s “Free Bird” likely played very well with an older demographic, Volkswagen – which was also among some students’ favorites – built its ad around House of Pain’s “Jump Around” – still an older song, but geared to a much younger audience.
“In previous years, Volkswagen has been very family oriented. But this year, with the music and with the people they’re showing, they’re trying to get you, the younger generation,” Prince told his students. “That ad isn’t aimed at me. And they’re not showing their most expensive vehicles. They’re showing more affordable options. Volkswagen took a different approach this year.”
The eye of the beholder
Speaking of different, there were large fluctuations in how some of the ads were received, none more so than Coinbase’s ad, which was ranked dead last by USA Today but placed second from the top in Ad Age’s listing, perhaps because it was so far out of the norm yet had a very simple message that cryptocurrency is for “everybody.”
Within the class, that same varied opinion was present with Mike Tyson’s ad for the Make America Healthy Again initiative. It scored poorly with Ad Age and with several students in the class, but another student had it ranked as her favorite.
Michelob Ultra chose to associate with the ongoing Winter Olympics, featuring skiing and, by casting Kurt Russell, alluding to the Herb Brooks-coached “Miracle on Ice” team from the 1980 Games.
“It was panned by critics, but USA Today had it in its top five,” said Prince. “Two different points of view.”
That was very much the case for Anthropic’s ad, “A Time and a Place” or, as the folks at Friends would title it, “The One with the Six-Pack.” It finished very near the bottom at tied for 46th in USA Today’s ranking but took the very top spot with Ad Age.
According to AdWeek, it was part of the 23% of Super Bowl ads that featured artificial intelligence. With so many such commercials coming one after the other, Adweek said “the ads largely lacked clear differentiation, leading to consumer confusion.”
And ultimately, said Prince, winning over the consumer is what it’s all about.
“There are critically important questions to ask if you’re in marketing and advertising,” he reminded his students. “It’s not just about commercials – it’s about the service a company provides and its brand. Are they successful in getting those important messages across?”
***Story Courtesy of Barry McNamara, Monmouth College***
