The Four Cs of Consistency: The Super Bowl Playbook

The Super Bowl is advertising’s biggest stage yet, too often, the spectacle of the game tempts brands to start again. The result is short-term impact at the expense of long-term growth. Brands may win the night, but lose momentum. 

The most effective Super Bowl advertising doesn’t chase the moment. It compounds. Like compound interest, consistent brand cues, characters, and emotional associations build value over time. The magic isn’t in the one-off. It’s in the accumulation.

The brands making the greatest impact, in both the short and long term, are the ones investing in a toolkit that exists well before the Big Game and extends far beyond it.

System1’s Competitive Edge database shows how the most effective Super Bowl advertisers show up over time. Not just in the Big Game itself, but in the consistency of the brand assets they build, reinforce, and compound year after year. 

Above: Budweiser’s nostalgic high-scoring ad for Super Bowl 2025, First Delivery, introduced the brand’s iconic Clydesdale, a popular ‘code’ that trotted into this year’s Big Game campaign.

Sixty percent of the most commercially powerful Super Bowl ads are also the most consistent, earning high levels of brand fluency. These brands aren’t reinventing the wheel for one night only. They’re sticking to a playbook by committing to the Four Cs of consistency: codes, characters, celebrities, and campaign.

Codes  

Brand codes are one of the most valuable assets a brand can bring to the Super Bowl, second only to emotion. They ensure that the emotional equity created by the ad is attributed to the brand itself, not to the category, or worse, to a competitor. Yet Super Bowl ads often hold back on brand codes. 

In many cases, that’s driven by a desire to build suspense, or to create something cinematic rather than overtly promotional. But this restraint comes at a cost. Delaying or diluting brand codes weakens overall brand fluency.

For a 30-second ad, brands should aim to feature their brand codes at least seven times to maximise memorability.

The most effective ads code within the first two to five seconds, ensuring instant recognition, and significantly strengthen brand fluency, meaning more people remember who the ad was for by the end.

Last year, Super Bowl brand fluency hit an all-time low, dropping to 79 per cent. When the stakes are this high, the audience this vast, and the price tag this extraordinary, can brands really afford to be forgotten by 21 per cent of viewers?

Above: Michelob’s 2026 Super Bowl ad featured Kurt Russell and Lewis Pullman in a similar light-hearted sports caper to last year’s pickleball themed spot with Willem Dafoe and Catherine O'Hara.

However, simply dropping a logo into the opening frame can hinder engagement as that’s not what effective coding looks like. When brand codes are woven into the narrative through a distinctive jingle, recognisable colours, an iconic tagline, or familiar visual cues, brands can hold on to emotion while strengthening mental availability.

For a 30-second ad, brands should aim to feature their brand codes at least seven times to maximise memorability. If that sounds excessive, or incompatible with emotional storytelling, look no further than Budweiser’s 2025 Super Bowl ad (above). It scored 100 per cent on System1’s brand fluency metric, alongside a 4.1 Star Rating. That places it in the top 25 per cent of all US advertising for emotional impact and long-term brand growth.

Do you want viewers to remember a great ad featuring Ben Affleck, or to think, 'that was a great Dunkin’ ad, with Ben Affleck in it'?

Michelob Ultra is another brand excelling in this area. Their 2026 Super Bowl ad, The Ultra Instructor, is a great example of how to lean into storytelling, while keeping the brand front and centre. The logo appears repeatedly – on the tap handle, bar mat, glassware, cans, and 12-packs – creating instant recognition without interrupting the narrative. 

Combined with the brand’s familiar jovial sports setting, these cues make the emotional payoff unmistakably Michelob Ultra, reinforcing long-term brand consistency.

Celebrities 

So what often replaces a well-built brand code toolkit? One of the Super Bowl’s favourite creative shortcuts: celebrities. It wouldn’t be the Big Game without them. But they need to be used strategically and with care.

While the short-term impact of celebrity-led ads can be strong, their long-term growth potential is less impressive, especially in a crowded field where multiple brands are competing for the same star power. 

Above: Ben Affleck starred in the hilarious celeb-studded, sitcom-themed Dunkin spot inspired by the film Good Will Hunting. This year's campaign marked Affleck's fourth appearance in the chain's big game ad. 

Celebrities 

So what often replaces a well-built brand code toolkit? One of the Super Bowl’s favourite creative shortcuts: celebrities. It wouldn’t be the Big Game without them. But they need to be used strategically and with care.

While the short-term impact of celebrity-led ads can be strong, their long-term growth potential is less impressive, especially in a crowded field where multiple brands are competing for the same star power. 

Around 60 per cent of Super Bowl ads feature a celebrity, yet ads that rely on them see brand fluency fall by an additional five percentage points.

Celebrities are as unpredictable as they are appealing.

The real question is this: do you want viewers to remember a great ad featuring Ben Affleck, or to think, “that was a great Dunkin’ ad, with Ben Affleck in it”?

Dunkin’ is worth celebrating because it is one of the few brands to use celebrity power both strategically and consistently. By featuring Affleck in its Super Bowl advertising for three previous consecutive years, the brand has built mental availability and emotional equity over time. And this pattern holds more broadly. Brands that repeatedly use the same celebrity see a an uplift in their Star Rating average.

As familiarity builds, audiences begin to associate the celebrity with the brand itself. The creative idea becomes easier to process, cognitive load reduces, and the ad becomes more enjoyable and more memorable. A win-win for emotion and memorability.  

Above: Though they are used less, brand mascots or characters tested as more effective than celebrities in System1's survey.

Campaigns  

Relying solely on a celebrity is a risky game. As a brand, there is little control over the potential for scandal or negative press. Celebrities are as unpredictable as they are appealing. 

One of the strongest examples of a brand mitigating this risk is Uber Eats. Rather than placing all its faith in individual star power, the brand has invested in a strong, repeatable campaign idea. This is what Orlando Wood, Chief Innovation Officer at System1 and ad academic, calls a “fluent device scenario”, where the creative concept stays consistent, even as the cast changes.

[Brand characters] transcend time, channels, and cultural moments.

Uber Eats launched 'Football Is for Food' with Matthew McConaughey and a roster of well-known faces at Super Bowl LIX, then compounded the success of the idea by refreshing it for the NFL season, this time fronted by Bradley Cooper.