Who Really Won Super Bowl LX? Let's Find Out.
The brands that broke through, the ones that flopped, and the data behind it all.
Super Bowl ads cost upward of $7 million for 30 seconds of airtime. But the real question isn’t who showed up. It’s who actually won the conversation.
We tracked hundreds of thousands of brand mentions across Twitter, Reddit, and news/web sources during Super Bowl LX, covering six categories: alcohol, snacks, AI, cars, sports betting, and non-alcoholic beverages. We measured volume, sentiment, engagement, reach, bot activity, and what we call Super Bowl campaign penetration (the share of a brand’s total conversation that was actually tied to the Super Bowl) to build a complete picture of who broke through and who fell flat.
The results challenged some assumptions. Here are a few that stood out.
Budweiser dominated the conversation. 70.6% of all Budweiser mentions were Super Bowl-specific, the highest campaign penetration of any brand in any category. The Clydesdales still work. Add in 2k+ average retweets per post, and the dominance was clear.
Lay’s had the best ad reception we measured. A 65.2% favorability rating and a 34.4 positive-to-negative ratio made Lay’s the most universally liked brand of Super Bowl LX.
Claude punched way above its weight. This was the first AI Super Bowl, with seven companies running spots. But Claude and ChatGPT generated virtually identical Super Bowl-specific buzz despite Claude having less than half the total brand volume. Anthropic’s “ad-free” counter-narrative against OpenAI’s simultaneous ad rollout produced direct comparison coverage across CNBC, CNN, Fortune, and Fox News, with a lower bot rate and higher per-post reach than its rival.
Doritos proved you can’t skip the Super Bowl. No ad. No problem? Not quite. Doritos hit 31% Super Bowl penetration (the highest in the snacks category) driven entirely by fan disappointment over a lack of a Doritos ad. Turns out, not showing up generates its own conversation. Mostly negative…
Cadillac made news, not friends. The F1 car reveal drove the second-highest Super Bowl campaign penetration of any brand we tracked (19%), but it was the only auto brand with negative-leaning sentiment, compounded by the Michael Bay lawsuit.
Fanatics had the biggest megaphone and the most backlash. 39.6 million average reach per post (thanks, Kendall Jenner), but also the most polarizing brand in the sports betting category.
These are just the highlights. The full report goes deeper across all six categories with volume and share of voice breakdowns, sentiment analysis, bot activity assessments, reach and engagement metrics, narrative trends, and category-by-category winner rankings.