Super Bowl Commercials: A History of the Best Spots, 1967 to 2026

How Super Bowl commercials began

The first championship game between the NFL and AFL, played in Los Angeles on January 15, 1967, was carried by both CBS and NBC. Commercial time cost roughly $40,000 for 30 seconds, about what a strong prime-time slot fetched that season. Nobody tuned in for the ads. They were the usual mix of cars, beer and cigarettes.

That changed slowly, and mostly because the audience kept growing. By the late 1970s the game had become the most watched broadcast of the American year, and advertisers began treating the break as a stage rather than a slot. The idea that Super Bowl commercials deserved their own reviews, rankings and water-cooler arguments arrived with two spots, five years apart.

The spots that made the history

Coca-Cola’s “Hey Kid, Catch!” first aired in 1979 and ran during Super Bowl XIV in January 1980. An injured Mean Joe Greene limps down a stadium tunnel, a boy offers him a bottle, and the gruff lineman tosses him his jersey. It proved that a game-day ad could carry a story people retold the next morning at work.

Then came January 22, 1984. During Super Bowl XVIII, Apple ran “1984,” a dystopian minute directed by Ridley Scott in which a runner hurls a hammer through a giant screen of a lecturing Big Brother. It introduced the Macintosh without showing the computer. The spot aired nationally only once, which only added to its legend in advertising history.

From there the pattern held. Brands saved their biggest budgets and strangest ideas for one Sunday in late January or early February, and newspapers started covering the breaks as news. Budweiser’s croaking frogs arrived in 1995. Doritos later handed the job to fans through its “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, which put consumer-made spots on air from 2007 to 2016.

Dot-com money, QR codes and the second screen

The 2000 game is remembered as the “Dot-com Super Bowl.” More than a dozen internet start-ups paid for national airtime, including Pets.com with its sock-puppet dog. Within a year or two, many of those companies had folded. The episode became a standing joke in the industry: a huge audience cannot rescue a business that has no customers.

Later breaks moved online early. Volkswagen put “The Force,” its tiny Darth Vader, on YouTube days before Super Bowl XLV in 2011. Oreo’s “You can still dunk in the dark” post during the 2013 blackout in New Orleans showed that a quick social reply could rival a paid spot. Both still turn up with a quick search.

In 2022 Coinbase ran a bouncing, colour-shifting QR code for a full minute with no voice-over at all. So many viewers scanned it that the site briefly struggled. Critics hated it, and the crypto exchange finished near the bottom of the popularity polls, yet nobody forgot it, which is the oldest bargain in Super Bowl commercials.

Super Bowl LX in 2026: the best and the most talked about

Super Bowl LX was played on February 8, 2026, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, and broadcast by NBC. Reported prices averaged about $8 million per 30 seconds, with a handful of slots selling above $10 million. The full figures and earlier years sit in the Super Bowl ad cost report.

USA TODAY’s Ad Meter, voted by roughly 190,000 panelists, named Budweiser’s “American Icons” the best spot of the night with a score of 4.00. A bald eagle and a Clydesdale share the screen to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” timed to Budweiser’s 150th year. It was the brand’s tenth Ad Meter win, a record, and its second in a row.

Lay’s “Last Harvest” finished second at 3.80, followed by Pepsi’s polar-bear spot “The Choice” at 3.50 and Dunkin’s “Good Will Dunkin’,” in which Ben Affleck revisits his 1997 film, at 3.48. Michelob ULTRA rounded out the top five. At the other end, Coinbase came last, with Svedka, Ro, Salesforce and Wix also in the bottom five.

The year’s loudest theme was artificial intelligence. Svedka’s robot spot was billed as the first Super Bowl ad made primarily with generative tools, and viewers mocked its uncanny faces. Anthropic, meanwhile, ran an ad poking fun at plans to put advertising inside chatbots. The wider argument about AI in advertising played out in real time.

What the best Super Bowl commercials have in common

Look at the winners across six decades and a few habits repeat. Most of the best spots tell one small story with a clear turn at the end. Animals, children and famous faces help, but only when they serve the joke or the feeling. Product features almost never win. Apple’s “1984” did not show a single Macintosh on screen.

Timing matters as much as craft. An ad placed in the first quarter reaches viewers before the party gets loud, while a spot near halftime competes with snacks and conversation. Many brands now release their work days early, so the broadcast becomes a second airing rather than a reveal. Plenty of the most shared spots were already familiar by kickoff.

Super Bowl commercials in Canada

Canadians watching on CTV usually see Canadian ads, not the American ones. Broadcasters may substitute their own signal when the same show airs at the same time, a rule known as simultaneous substitution. The CRTC banned the practice for the Super Bowl starting with the 2017 game, so Canadian viewers got the famous American breaks for three seasons.

Bell and the NFL challenged it, and in December 2019 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the CRTC had no authority to single out one program. Substitution returned for Super Bowl LIV in 2020. That is why so many Canadians now watch the American lineup on YouTube the next day, a habit covered under Canadian commercials.

Canadian advertisers use the slot too, though their budgets are a fraction of American ones and the spots rarely travel south. Some of them have become small classics in their own right. For the broader story of how a single ad becomes a cultural reference, the famous advertising campaigns page goes back further than the first kickoff.