Super Bowl 2026 spots hit $10 million as AI, stars and nostalgia dominate

NBCUniversal is in the middle of its “Legendary February,” with the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics overlapping on its platforms.

Some Super Bowl ads will cost a record $10 million for a 30-second spot on NBC. On Peacock, placements will reportedly go for $2 million to $3 million, double or triple the cost of ads on Tubi during last year’s game.

If there’s a throughline of this year’s ads, it’s humor, nostalgia, celebrity and tech.

NBCU’s chairman of global advertising of partnerships, Mark Marshall, said on The Varsity podcast that about 40% of all advertisers are new compared to last year, when the game aired on Fox.

Uber’s ad, starring Bradley Cooper, Matthew McConaughey and Parker Posey, lets users create their own versions of the ad inside the app. The company says there are over 1,000 different combinations of ads, with 11 versions uploaded to YouTube by Tuesday.

The ad, created by Special U.S., is also offering in-app deals to users who play around with different versions.

Pepsi takes a not-so-subtle jab at its archrival, Coca-Cola, with its polar bear ad, deliberately co-opting one of Coke’s most iconic brand symbols to turn the long-running “cola wars” into a taste-test punch line. Academy Award winner Taika Waititi directed the spot, which also references the infamous Coldplay concert clip.

Ben Stiller and Benson Boone star in this Instacart ad directed by Academy Award winner Spike Jonze. There’s also a 2:29 version on YouTube, which was uploaded nearly two weeks before the Super Bowl. BBDO created the Instacart and Pepsi ads, as well as spots for Budweiser, Wells Fargo, Pringles and Oikos.

“Because media is so fragmented, the sheer energy of Super Bowl ads — amplified by early releases and an always-online audience — turns them into cultural artifacts,” Chris Beresford-Hill, BBDO’s worldwide chief creative officer, told The Current. “They draw more attention than ever, and they endure precisely because there are so few moments left when we’re all focused on the same thing at the same time.”

Svedka is debuting what it says is the first Super Bowl ad made primarily through AI. The vodka brand says it embraced the risk to stand out and is prepared for potential backlash. Svedka is also the first vodka maker to advertise in the Super Bowl in three decades.

This comes less than a year after the first-ever fully AI-generated ad aired during the NBA Finals.

Andy Samberg stars as “Meal Diamond” in Hellmann’s spot. For VML, the agency behind the ad, celebrity alone wasn’t the hook.

“Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ is the ultimate sports song for the Super Bowl,” Duc Nguyen, group account director at VML, told The Current. “Fans sing it in stadiums all over the world. And its sense of shared celebration pairs perfectly with the joy of Hellmann’s ‘Sandwich Time.’ And that’s where Andy Samberg comes in. He’s the ideal celebrity to bring it all together and make it all feel seamless in a spot that, we think, is going to be ‘so good, so good, so good’ come Super Bowl Sunday.”

George Clooney stars in Grubhub’s first-ever Super Bowl ad. The commercial, created and produced by creative agency Anomaly, is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. It leans into the filmmaker’s signature surrealism.