Super Bowl commercials
television commercials during the Super Bowl

Super Bowl commercials, colloquially known as Super Bowl ads and sometimes referred to as Big Game spots for legal reasons, are high-profile television commercials featured in the U.S. television broadcast of the Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League (NFL). Super Bowl commercials have become a cultural phenomenon of their own alongside the game itself, as many viewers only watch the game to see the commercials. Many Super Bowl advertisements have become well known because of their cinematographic quality, unpredictability, surreal humor, and use of special effects. The use of celebrity cameos has also been common in Super Bowl ads. Some commercials airing during, or proposed to air during the game, have also attracted controversy due to the nature of their content.
The phenomenon of Super Bowl commercials is a result of the game's extremely high viewership and wide demographic reach. Super Bowl games have frequently been among the United States' most-watched television broadcasts; Super Bowl LVIII in 2024 had an average viewership of 123.7 million viewers across all platforms, which surpassed the previous year's Super Bowl as the most-watched television broadcast in U.S. history. As such, advertisers have typically used commercials during the Super Bowl as a means of building awareness for their products and services among this wide audience, while also trying to generate buzz around the ads themselves so they may receive additional exposure, such as becoming a viral video. National surveys (such as the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter) judge which advertisement carried the best viewer response, and CBS has aired annual specials chronicling notable commercials from the game. Several major brands, including Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Doritos, GoDaddy, Master Lock, and Tide have been well known for making repeated appearances during the Super Bowl.
The public source identifies “Super Bowl commercials” as television commercials during the Super Bowl. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Super, Bowl and commercials.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4122130. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Super Bowl commercials” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.