The Super Bowl's best ads are running on empty

Budweiser won the USA Today Ad Meter for a record 10th time on Sunday.

When I saw the results, I did something I hadn't done before. I reviewed all Ad Meter scores from 2009. I adjusted them to a common scale and averaged the top ten ads for each year.

The pattern revealed a disturbing trend.

The Decade-Long Ceiling

Here are the top-ten averages, adjusted to a 5-point scale:

• 2009: 3.90 · 2010: 3.77 · 2011: 3.87 · 2012: 4.20

• 2013: 3.59 · 2014: 3.51 · 2015: 3.41 · 2016: 3.17

• 2017: 3.39 · 2018: 3.38 · 2019: 3.41 · 2020: 3.30

• 2021: 3.32 · 2022: 3.26 · 2023: 3.12 · 2024: 3.11

• 2025: 3.47 · 2026: 3.51

Something cracked around 2013.

The averages dropped, then flatlined for a full decade. Only now, in 2025 and 2026, have they climbed back to 2013–2014 levels.

Part of the initial drop was a measurement change. In 2013, USA Today shifted the Ad Meter from focus groups to online voting. In a group, laughter is infectious. It raises scores due to Social Facilitation. The shift to phone voting removed that effect and deflated scores across the board.

But that only explains the cliff between 2012 and 2013.

Once the new system was in place, the scores still slid. And they stayed suppressed for over a decade.

Something else was happening. Something inside the industry.

The Forces That Broke the Work

Between 2012 and 2016, four forces converged to degrade the industry's creative output.

The first was the pivot from ideas to data. As programmatic advertising and hyper-targeting grew, CMOs started to believe that efficiency was key. They thought it could replace persuasion.

A 2016 AMA Article captured the mood. One leader warned that "many have been blinded by the technology itself... missing one of the most powerful opportunities: creativity." The belief was simple: with enough data, you didn't need a great ad. You just needed the right eyeballs.

This belief had a direct consequence for creative work. When the goal becomes "right person, right time," the quality of the message becomes secondary. Agencies invest in targeting systems, not storytelling. Budgets shift from production to media buying. The ads become interchangeable containers for offers. And they lose the depth that makes people care.

The second was the loss of sustained attention. Between 2012 and 2016, U.S. smartphone use surged from roughly 45% to over 80%. Data from Infillion found that more than 80% of Super Bowl viewers were on a second screen during the game. To combat this, agencies designed ads to be "glanceable": louder, faster, built to jerk attention from the phone.

This shift reshaped the creative process itself. Research by McIlvaine and colleagues identified a key change in ad creation. Before the shift, the process was "human-led." It started with a customer insight, and the creative team built a story around that truth. The medium served the message.

After the shift, the process became "device-led." It started with a delivery format (a six-second bumper ad, a vertical mobile video, a social media clip designed for sharing). The creative team worked backward from the container, instead of the customer. The message served the medium.

This inversion made ads more efficient to distribute. But they became less likely to create the associations that build brands.

The third was risk aversion. Data is backward-looking. As reliance on it grew, agencies tested concepts to death before they aired, producing a regression to the mean. The ideas that tested safest were the ones that looked most like what already worked. This cycle stripped the work of surprise, the very quality that makes people pay attention.

The fourth, and most damaging, was the empathy gap. A study called ”The Empathy Delusion,” published by Reach Solutions, revealed a stark reality. People making ads were nothing like the people watching them.

Agency employees tended to be coastal, urban, educated, and socially liberal. The Super Bowl audience skewed toward tradition, security, and conservatism.

This gap hit its low point in 2015.

Misreading data about Millennials and "purpose-driven" brands, agencies decided the Super Bowl was the place to lecture America on social issues. Nationwide Insurance aired an ad about a child who died in a preventable accident. Nissan aired a somber spot about a father missing his son's childhood. Toyota featured a tearful military send-off. Slate captured the mood with the headline: "What's With All the Dark, Depressing Super Bowl Ads This Year?"

The public recoiled.

By 2016, brands, fearing they might become cautionary tales, chose to play it safe and bland. The scores showed it.

The Effectiveness Collapse

The Ad Meter captures how people feel about ads. But the damage went deeper than feelings.

Peter Field and Les Binet tracked what they call the "creative multiplier," using the IPA Databank (covering over 1,400 campaigns from 1998 to 2022). The creative multiplier measures how much more effective ambitious campaigns are at driving business results compared to average ones.

Through the early 2000s, that multiplier was large. By the late 2010s, it had collapsed.

The IPA data showed a direct link. As the industry shifted toward short-term, sales-focused messaging (what Field calls "salesmanship" over "showmanship"), overall effectiveness declined.

Orlando Wood, in his books, Lemon and Look Out, mapped the decline from the creative side. Elements tied to emotional engagement (dialogue, characters, melody, a sense of place) were vanishing from ads. Replacing them: text on screen, abstract imagery, rhythmic soundtracks, product close-ups.

The work was easier to produce and more flexible across formats. It was also invisible.

Why the Scores Recovered, and What That Actually Means

Against this backdrop, the 2025 and 2026 Ad Meter recovery looks different.

Here is the 2026 top five:

1. Budweiser "American Icons": Clydesdales (a brand asset since 1933), a bald eagle, and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" (1973).

2. Lay's "Last Harvest": An emotional potato farmer story set to Keane's "Somewhere Only We Know" (2004).

3. Pepsi "The Choice": A Coca-Cola polar bear (Coke's mascot since 1993) takes the Pepsi Challenge (from 1975), set to Queen's "I Want to Break Free" (1984), with a callback to a 2025 Coldplay viral moment.

4. Dunkin' "Good Will Dunkin'": A remake of the 1997 film Good Will Hunting as a '90s sitcom, packed with '80s and '90s NBC comedy stars. Ben Affleck's third year in the Dunkin' cinematic universe.

5. Michelob Ultra "The ULTRA Instructor": Kurt Russell and Winter Olympians.

Every ad in the top five is built mainly from pre-existing cultural material: legacy brand assets, classic songs, old movies, borrowed mascots, and known celebrity personas.

These ads are not dull. They don't trigger neutrality. Budweiser generates warmth. Lay's makes people cry. Pepsi makes people laugh.

But there is a gap between generating emotion and generating meaning.

Every top ad this year activated existing associations. The Clydesdales already meant "tradition." "Free Bird" already meant "American anthem." Coca-Cola's polar bear already meant "refreshment" before Pepsi borrowed it.

The Pepsi Challenge is a 50-year-old concept. Good Will Hunting came out in 1997.

These ads reinforced what people already felt. They didn't give anyone a new reason to choose the brand.

The scores didn't recover because the creative thinking improved. They recovered because the industry got better at mining the past.

The Nostalgia Tailwind

This makes sense when you zoom out.

We are in the middle of what researchers call a "nostalgia boom." The traditional nostalgia cycle used to revisit a period about 20 to 30 years later. Now, it has shortened to around 10 years.

The acceleration is driven by three forces: digital archiving (nothing is forgotten), algorithmic amplification (platforms reward nostalgic content because it generates 2x higher engagement), and the collapse of what cultural theorists call the "forgetting phase" that once separated eras.

The data is everywhere. Reader's Digest reported that TikTok saw a 452% increase in searches for "2016" in early 2026. Spotify saw a 71% spike in 2016-specific playlists. And the Pinterest Predicts 2026 report found that "comfort" is the top emotional driver for 55% of global consumers.

The pandemic was the accelerant.

A peer-reviewed study published in PMC analyzed social media data from Douyin (TikTok's Chinese counterpart) to measure how nostalgic content changed during COVID-19. The researchers found an immediate spike in nostalgic posting the moment lockdowns began. Not a gradual trend. A structural break in behavior.

The neuroscience supports this.

A 2025 study from Yale found that cortisol alters brain networks to favor nostalgia. It strengthens emotional memories while weakening the brain's capacity to process uncertain futures. Under chronic stress, the brain retreats to what's known. The familiar feels safe because its outcome is certain.

The Ad Meter measures likability: "Did I enjoy this?" It does not measure whether the ad changed a single perception about the brand.

In 2026, the industry responded to a stressed crowd. It gave people what they craved: horses they love, songs they know, characters they trust, and rivalries they already get.

This is where the threads come together. The data pivot replaced insight with efficiency. The attention crisis replaced depth with speed. Risk aversion replaced surprise with formula. The empathy gap replaced understanding with assumption.

When work stopped connecting, the industry turned to nostalgia. It's a reliable emotional shortcut that doesn't need new customer insights.

The result is ads that make people feel something but don't give them anything new. Emotion without meaning. Warmth without growth.

The Diminishing Return

But even nostalgia has a ceiling. Budweiser's own history proves it.

Using distinctive brand assets consistently is a smart strategy. Budweiser should use the Clydesdales. They are one of the most effective brand devices ever created. The question is what you do with them.

In 2014, "Puppy Love" scored an adjusted 4.15, higher than any ad since. Its structure: an animal friendship between a Clydesdale and a puppy. A bond forms. They're separated. The horse escapes to find its friend. Emotional reunion.

Same heritage, same horses, but a new story. The asset was stable. The storytelling was fresh.

In 2026, "American Icons" runs the same template. An animal friendship between a Clydesdale and a bald eagle. The eagle is hurt. The horse helps. They bond. It's "Puppy Love" with the puppy swapped for an eagle, the intimacy replaced with patriotism, and "Free Bird" on top.

It scored a 4.00. Lower than the original, despite every tailwind.

"Puppy Love" aired 14 years ago, right in line with the compressed nostalgia window. "American Icons" is nostalgic for its own previous ad. And then it layers a second coat: Americana, "Free Bird," the 150th anniversary, the bald eagle.

They threw more borrowed meaning at it and got less back.

The first time Budweiser told an animal friendship story with the Clydesdales, it was original. It was a new narrative built on an existing asset. The second time, it was a cover of their own greatest hit. And even in a moment where nostalgia appetite is at an all-time high, the cover didn't outperform the original.

Why This Matters If You're Not Budweiser

You don't have Clydesdales. You don't have 150 years of heritage or an $8 million production budget.

If the best-funded brands in the world, with the last monoculture audience of 100+ million, are defaulting to the past, it says something about the state of the industry. And if you follow the same instincts, like using comfortable messages and category conventions, you’re playing their game. But you don’t have their resources.

But this is also your edge. The giants are stuck. So much brand equity that the easiest move is always to leverage what exists. You don't have that constraint. You have the freedom, and the need, to do the thing these $8 million ads chose not to do.

You can uncover something new about your customer and build your brand around it.

The Deeper Problem, and the Way Out

The decline in ad effectiveness mirrors a broader trend in how we think.

Dr. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary analyzed  nearly 300,000 scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, the gold standard in divergent thinking research. Since 1990, scores have declined, with the steepest drops in "Elaboration": the ability to take a basic idea and develop it with detail and specificity.

This isn't about intelligence. IQ keeps rising. It's about the ability to develop an idea. The ability to push past the obvious into specific, granular detail, is eroding. And that ability is what separates an ad that activates a familiar feeling from one that reveals a new insight.

Angus Fletcher, a narrative creativity researcher at Ohio State's Project Narrative, makes a useful distinction. The standard model of creativity, "Divergent Thinking," is about generating lots of ideas. But Fletcher argues that's a retrieval exercise, not an invention exercise.

The real engine of original thinking is what he calls "Narrative Creativity." It's the brain's ability to simulate a specific chain of actions, causes, and outcomes that doesn't exist yet.

This maps directly to the Elaboration decline Kim identified. The industry doesn't have an idea shortage. It has a development shortage. Agencies often settle for the first version that feels right. They don’t dig deeper.

But specificity is where original insight lives.

Three Questions to Build New Meaning With What You Have

The Super Bowl offers a diagnostic. Three questions to test whether your brand is building new meaning or just showing up.

1. Are your distinctive assets working harder each year, or just showing up?

Consistent brand assets are essential. But consistency is not repetition. Budweiser's Clydesdales in "Puppy Love" (2014) told a new story and scored a 4.15. The same Clydesdales in "American Icons" (2026) replayed the formula with a patriotic coat of paint and scored a 4.00. More nostalgia, less impact.

Your logo, your voice, your visual identity: these should be stable. But the stories you tell with them should keep revealing new dimensions of what your brand means.

2. Can you name the specific customer insight your marketing is built on?

Not a demographic. Not a persona. A specific insight: a tension, a frustration, an unmet need you've found through direct contact with your customers.

If you can't state your insight in one sentence, your marketing is built on assumption. And assumption is how you end up with a message that could have any brand's name on it.

3. Does your marketing give your customer a new reason to choose you, or just a familiar feeling?

Familiar feelings build comfort. New reasons build preference. Both have value. But only one drives growth for a brand that doesn't already own its category.

If a competitor could swap their name into your message and it still works, you're advertising your category, not your brand. The goal is to find the thing only you can say, because only you did the work to find it.

The $8 million Super Bowl ad is the most scrutinized piece of marketing on Earth. In 2026, the top five chose comfort over clarity and old meaning over new.

The brands that grow from here won't follow that lead. They'll use what they have (their assets, their heritage, their identity) to say something their customer has never heard before.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. If you found this valuable, share it with another leader, coworker or colleague who could use a new lens on their brand.