Uber Eats.
Super Bowl 2026 commercials will include celebrity and light humour, focus on general health and wellness, nostalgia and attention-grabbing tactics, according to industry experts.
With campaigns set to bring attention to a wealth gap in health care, Telehealth company Ro is entering the Super Bowl with an ad focused on improving consumers’ lives via weight loss, featuring Serena Williams and Charles Barkley.
Novartis’ is focusing on early disease protection, and new advertiser Liquid I.V.'s ad is focused on hydration.
Blue Square Alliance is back with a message about tolerance and discouraging anti-Semitism.
Villanova University professor of marketing, Charles R. Taylor, told AdNews that we live in an era of fragmented media “where there are very few chances for brands to capture the attention of a high proportion of consumers all at the same time.”
“With an audience of 127 million viewers, the reach is unique,” Taylor said.
“As the Super Bowl is a pop culture event in the U.S. people pay high levels of attention to the ad. This creates the opportunity for the ad to stand out and get talked about in a way that is unique and can allow brands to attach themselves to pop culture."
Both academic and practitioner research shows that well-made Super Bowl ads can be good at building brand awareness, reinforcing positive brand associations, increasing liking and preference for the brand, and improving purchase attention and actual sales, according to Taylor.
Budweiser’s 2026 Super Bowl commercial ‘American Icons’ uses a Bald Eagle and Clydesdale to tribute to the nostalgic American 'dream.'
Taylor said nostalgia will be prevalent in many campaigns this year, as brands that are consistent can access memory associations and help audiences engage the message faster.
“Campaigns for a brand that are consistent over time provide two major advantages—first, the viewer is more easily able to access associations stored in memory. They can process the message faster, which allows for positive associations to be made more easily," he said.
“Second, consistency reinforces the brand’s positioning and gets across the product features or emotional associations that drive purchase.
“In a study my co-authors and I published in the Journal of Advertising, we found that repeat Super Bowl advertisers that ran consistent ads and differentiated the brand had a significant advantage over other ads.”
Uber Eats have teased their four short pre-release films ahead of the Super Bowl, featuring Matthew McConaughey, Bradley Cooper, and Parker Pose.
This is the second time Matthew McConaughey has featured in a Super Bowl Uber Eats commercial, appearing last year in 'A Century of Cravings.'
Creative was done by Special US.
Celebrity as a ‘brand’ tactic for Super Bowl commercials have been going since the early 1970’s, with a popular reference back to Coca-Cola's "Hey Kid, Catch!" featuring NFL star Joe Greene in 1980.
“The use of celebrities is very common because they are highly effective in instantly grabbing viewer attention, especially if it is an “A” list celebrity," Taylor said.
“When used properly, celebrity endorsements can be effective, but the celebrity needs to be a “fit” with the brand and “fit” or “match-up” with the brand’s positioning. On average, ads with celebrities in them do not outperform ads without them, but they are good at getting viewer attention.
“In the terminology of Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute in Adelaide, mascots are also distinctive brand assets.
“Many consumers have good feelings about mascots. It invokes positive associations with the brand in a way that does not require much cognitive thinking.
“And this leads to mascots, on average, outperforming celebrities in Super Bowl advertising.”
Hellmann's has continued the use of celebrity in a collaboration with Elle Fanning and Andy Samberg.
Taylor also predicts a collaboration of human-AI created advertisements.
"Academic research shows that consumers are skeptical about fully AI-generated ads, as a typical consumer thinks there is something spooky or eerie about machine-generated content," he said.
"Consumers sometimes get alienated by deepfakes or AI-generated content that they don’t immediately identify as such. However, recently, more consumers are using AI in their daily lives and can see the positive side of it.
"So consumers can accept that advertisers used AI to create more creative possibilities or develop a good image/story as long as humans were involved in making modifications—this allows the “eerie” aspect to go away as the AI gets humanised in the eyes of the viewer."
Brands can measure their advertisement success using personal metrics.
"New brands may want to set goals in terms of increasing awareness and liking. Established brands often want to reinforce specific associations, brand equity measures, and/or increase sales," Taylor said.
"Super Bowl ads for brands that have a differentiating feature have been found to be able to achieve objectives at all levels of the marketing funnel and often to great effect."
Here’s a list of new trailers that have been released this week:
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