It’s arguably the riskiest move in marketing: daring to ask the CEO for a cool $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot. In a fragmented media landscape marked by shortened attention spans and ruthless competition, that bold request can quickly turn into a career-defining gamble.

To explore the stakes, the American Marketing Association – Rochester Chapter invited six marketing leaders to a post-game webinar this week to break down how brands performed while the players battled. Rather than picking a winner, each expert chose one ad to analyze in depth.

About 50 people jumped online to hear what our MVP panel had to say. Here are the highlights:

America Needs Neighbors Like You l Redfin x Rocket Mortgage

Redfin, a technology-driven real estate company, had Amanda DeVito, chief marketing officer of Butler/Till (not to mention the rest of us), feeling all the feels with a spot that opted for emotion. An arm of Rocket Mortgage, the Redfin spot highlighted the uncertainties involved in moving -- and how kind-hearted neighbors can help ease the sting. Driving it home: the ad was underscored with a Lady Gaga arrangement of Mr. Rogers’ iconic “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

DeVito said the ad worked on multiple levels -- perhaps most significantly, “cultural timing.”

“I think it understands the moment that we're in. It reads the room…Right now, culture's incredibly loud, it's incredibly fragmented, it's incredibly politicized, and I don't know about all of you, but it's exhausting. When they zoom in on that young girl's face, and she's crying, I felt like I was in her body, crying with her.

“I also think right now people aren't craving novelty for novelty's sake. I think we're actually craving grounding. Again, opinions of Amanda DeVito, by the way, not Butler/Till, but I'll tell you, I am craving grounding. This spot doesn't chase trends…It is storytelling at its finest.”

Artlist’s Official Big Game Commercial 2026

Some may not realize that the Super Bowl’s ad inventory creates space for smaller and emerging brands to advertise regionally. Artlist, which aims to be a one-stop shop for assets for content creators, offered a spot premised on one of its essential use cases: The ability for creatives to produce high-quality ads with affordable imagery quickly. The first line of the ad indicates that Artlist decided to purchase the Super Bowl ad only a week ago.

“Artlist didn't just run an ad. They really put their product to the ultimate test on the biggest screen or stage there can possibly be,” says. Erin Sheridan, senior brand director at DS+Co.

“I thought about briefing my creative teams and giving them three days to execute, and what that conversation would probably look and sound like. But they really put this challenge to their team…From a brand perspective, this is a product demo, again, at the biggest moment for advertising. And we know Super Bowl ads traditionally take months of planning, massive budgets, and huge teams. They were able to flip that model on its head, produce it in-house, with their in-house team, and really look at speed and agility as the primary spaces to kind of win here.

“What's also interesting to me about this is it's not necessarily about replacing creativity, but it's just redefining what's possible, which I think is something all of us in this industry are up against today, more so than ever, with the way in which AI has just kind of taken and pivoted a lot of what we're doing.”

While Sheridan admits she didn’t love the execution, she has “admiration for the ambition and proof of concept.”

MANSCAPED® Presents "Hair Ballad"

Some of the most memorable Super Bowl ads use humor to get attention. Once he got past the weirdness of anthropomorphized facial and chest hair singing a sad ballad to men who are shaving, Jeremy Schwartz, founder and managing partner of Truth Collective, realized he “couldn’t look away.”

But beneath the humor -- and slight discomfort -- Schwartz found something more. “They’re friggin’ singing hairballs, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that humor isn't the whole point. It's only the execution … What's core to this ad is humility. And I don't mean humility in a sentimental Hallmark card sense. I mean it very literally.

“The brand's kind of acknowledging how awkward this entire category is, and how awkward humanity can be. What's striking is that there's no bold statement on masculinity. There's no slow-motion, confident man montage. Instead, we get clumps of hair lamenting their own existence and their impending demise. So Manscaped doesn't position itself above the audience at all here. It doesn't lecture or inspire; it just kind of settles right in with men everywhere and says, "Yeah, this is weird." Bodies are strange, grooming is uncomfortable, welcome to being human. That’s humility, and it's kind of a notable choice in a category that usually leans on status, sexual, and empowerment cues, all of which subtly suggest that you're not enough unless you use their product.”

"American Icons” - Budweiser | Super Bowl LX Commercial

One constant in Super Bowl advertising: year after year, Budweiser is there. The global beer brand has appeared in the Big Game for at least the past 47 years. In its one-minute 2026 spot, Budweiser leans into a classic patriotic theme, blending a galloping Clydesdale with a soaring American bald eagle in a series of interactions underscored by “Freebird,” the classic rock anthem from Lynyrd Skynyrd.

After so many years, it’s remarkable that the Clydesdales continue to serve Budweiser as “a vehicle to reinforce their brand heritage and longevity,” says Ray Martino, who co-founded the Martino Flynn marketing and communications agency in 1997. (The firm is now known as Flynn.) Martino now teaches at Nazareth University.

“This ad, to me, has it all. It's got beautiful cinematography. The message was emotional and subtle in terms of its patriotism. They were paying homage to the 250th anniversary of the nation with the American. The horse references the 150-year celebration of Budweiser’s existence.”

Martino provided the discussion with the larger historical context by also showing the historic “1984” Apple ad that introduced the world to the Apple Macintosh personal computer. Martino told the webinar that the “1984” commercial “sets the standard that everyone tries to attain.”

The ad, he said, was daring for Apple even if the stakes were not quite as high -- Apple probably paid $800,000 for the minute-long spot, compared to this year’s $8 million price tag for 30 seconds. “At the time, Apple was a challenger brand looking to break into the PC market,” he said. “They made a bold move.”

”Unavailable” | Big Game Commercial 2026 | Squarespace

Only time will tell, but one of the Big Game’s big advertisers might find itself disappointed with its ROI, according to one of our experts.

Squarespace, a software company that helps people and businesses build and run websites, opted for a celebrity approach featuring actress Emma Stone. But the brand seemed to tell an outdated story about itself as an organization that supplies publishers with validated URL addresses, says Brian Rapp, Creative Director at Rapp Creative.

“You know, 15 years ago, GoDaddy was telling you to get your URL, and we haven't progressed past that? I'm a big fan of Squarespace itself. I am a copywriter, and I've created multiple websites using Squarespace. It really is easy to use, and you can make some amazing stuff, but they're just promoting URL searches, so I was kind of scratching my head about that. And frankly, in the spot, it doesn't even seem like there's a resolution. Does she get the URL? It doesn't seem like she does.”

However, Rapp said, Squarespace may have “hedged their bets” by making the ad the cornerstone of an omnichannel campaign. Visitors to the URL featured in the ad, Emmastone.com, see a message that “kind of wraps around the spot. They have the teaser. They have some behind-the-scenes stuff. They have lots of parts and pieces, so they get an ‘A’ for being 360 (degrees) on this. But I keep coming back to: ‘Is that all there is?’”

“Jurassic Park... Works” | Big Game Commercial 2026 | Xfinity

The best ads are those that evoke a range of emotions, our marketers agreed. Xfinity used its time on the big stage to lean into both humor and nostalgia, featuring the original Jurassic Park stars — Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum. The premise is that Xfinity, a broadband, streaming, and mobile technology provider, is proving instrumental in fixing what went wrong in the original movie.

Its reliance on callbacks to the 1990s phenomenon was enough to capture the attention of millennial Matt Calabrese, Director of Photography and Co-Founder of Calabrese Studio.

“I've seen that spot now, maybe, 25 times, and I was still giggling when I saw it again just now. I picked this spot because I grew up with Jurassic Park. I had the lunch boxes; I had toy dinosaurs. It was just a real feel-good laugh that hit home with me as a member of the demographic.

“It’s taking something old and making it new again as blockbuster nostalgia.”

Also interesting to Calabrese: the collaboration it took to deliver the ad. “George Lucas' original company from way back in the 70s,Industrial Light and Magic, worked on the special effects for this spot. Universal Pictures was involved.

“Amblin Entertainment, Lucas’s other production company, was involved, and the agency for this was Goodby Silverstein and Partners. The giant team that came together to make this was wild. They rebuilt all those sets. I thought that that was fantastic.”

Interested in connecting with more marketing superstars like the ones on our panel? Join AMA|Rochester, or connect with us to learn about volunteer opportunities.