Ben McCallum.
Ben McCallum, CEO, Cummins & Partners.
The Superbowl takes place this weekend in California, will the Patriots or Seahawks be crowned the 2026 “World” champions?
The truth is I don’t really care, I have tried with NFL for many years even attending a game in that time, maybe it’s the stop start nature that has turned me off or the fact that you could binge watch an entire series in the same time.
However, I will be watching on Monday to see the adverts. Is there another moment when we eagerly anticipate the ad break?
It takes advertising back to what most of us fell in love with, being entertained. Superbowl ads aren’t there to tell us how well optimised they were or which piece of tech was implemented to segment audiences and isolate us as individual prospects.
They are there to engage, entertain and influence. And I love it. For one night, pr morning in our case here in Australia, advertising is not an interruption it is part of the experience.
The frustrating part is that this is only a fleeting moment, the 15 minutes of fame that advertising gets during the Super Bowl simply isn’t enough. We need to create more moments like this, it’s on us to do this too. If advertising still works, spectacularly, in the Superbowl setting, the problem isn’t that audiences hate advertising. The problem is that most advertising no longer gives them a reason to enjoy it.
The Super Bowl proves that when brands take responsibility for entertaining people, advertising regains its power. When they don’t, it disappears into the noise.
This isn’t even about humour versus seriousness, or spectacle versus subtlety. Some of the most effective Super Bowl advertising is restrained, emotional or simple. What unites it is intent. These ads are made for the moment, designed to be watched, not endured.
Most campaigns today are designed to be optimised, not remembered. Built to survive platforms, not shape culture. Tested to death before they ever reach an audience. Creativity has been compressed into formats designed for speed and safety rather than impact and influence with big ideas being diluted. Entertainment is treated as indulgent rather than effective and attention is viewed as a risk to be managed, not an asset to be earned.
And now AI pours petrol on the problem. Because AI makes it ridiculously easy to produce “good enough” work at scale, same prompts, same templates, same safe outputs, same sameness. When everyone can make content, the content stops being the advantage. The danger isn’t that AI will replace creativity. It’s that it will replace difference. Brands will start to look and sound like each other, optimised into a beige blur of competence. And in a world where attention is scarce, blending in is the most expensive choice you can make.
The Super Bowl shows what happens when brands stop over engineering data and risk assessment and start behaving like entertainers. Advertising doesn’t just work, it dominates conversation. It becomes culturally relevant again.
If your brand is to be worthy of a Super Bowl spot it must stand for something, say something, and commit to an idea in front of a mass audience. In a fragmented world, that confidence is rare, and increasingly valuable.
This is why the Super Bowl isn’t just a sporting event or an advertising showcase. It’s a reminder of what advertising used to be capable of and could be again.
The lesson for Australian advertising isn’t that we need our own Super Bowl. It’s that advertising only works when it earns attention rather than assumes it.
Entertainment is no longer a nice to have, it’s a requirement.