Eight million dollars.

That's what brands are paying for 30 seconds during Super Bowl LX on February 8th. For context, that's roughly $266,667 per second. Blink and you've missed a quarter million dollars of someone's marketing budget.

You could buy a nice house in most American cities for that. You could fund a startup. You could pay 160 teachers for a year. Or you could watch Matthew McConaughey run through Heathrow Airport selling enterprise software for half a minute.

Welcome to advertising's most expensive group therapy session.

The celebrity arms race has, predictably, escalated. This year's roster includes Lady Gaga (Rocket Companies), Adrien Brody (TurboTax), Bowen Yang (Ritz), and the entire cast of what appears to be a mid-budget action movie reuniting for... ice cream. The Afflecks are back for Dunkin'. Sydney Sweeney showed up in that Hellmann's thing. Bad Bunny's doing the halftime show, so expect every brand within shouting distance to figure out how to make that about them too.

Celebrity appearances in Super Bowl ads jumped 13% last year. Sixty-three percent of spots now feature someone famous. It's less "advertising" at this point and more "which recognizable face can we rent for the evening."

But here's the thing nobody in the C-suite wants to hear: the data suggests this might be expensive nonsense. More on that in a moment.

Then there's AI, which is having its second Super Bowl coming-out party after last year's... mixed results. Remember when Google's Gemini confidently told America that gouda accounts for 50-60% of global cheese consumption? That was fun. The company had to edit the ad after it aired because their chatbot apparently hallucinates about dairy.

OpenAI made its debut with an artsy black-and-white number comparing ChatGPT to the moon landing. Meta put three Chrises (Hemsworth, Pratt, and... Kris Jenner, close enough) in a museum to show off their Ray-Ban smart glasses. The reviews were, charitably, "interesting."

This year, the AI play is more subtle. Brands are using it behind the scenes rather than making it the star. Probably wise, given the cheese incident.

And speaking of subtlety—ha—Budweiser is going full America for the semiquincentennial. Their spot features a Clydesdale horse befriending a baby bald eagle, set to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird," culminating in what can only be described as "patriotism as a visual experience." The eagle's name is Lincoln. I am not making this up.

It's America's 250th birthday this year, and the NFL has gone all-in with the White House on commemorative everything. For Budweiser—celebrating its own 150th anniversary—this is apparently the moment to retreat to the safe harbor of eagles and horses after a few, shall we say, turbulent years for the brand.

Nostalgic patriotism is the play when you don't want to make anyone mad. Which, fair enough. But it does make you wonder what exactly we're celebrating when the whole strategy is "let's not talk about anything happening right now."

Here's the part that should keep CMOs up at night: roughly one in five people who watch a Super Bowl ad can't tell you which brand it was for. Twenty-one percent. At $8 million a pop, that's about $1.7 million going to... what, exactly? Building the celebrity's personal brand? Making the agency's award reel?

And it gets worse. After last year's blowout—the Eagles demolished the Chiefs 40-22—recall metrics actually dropped compared to the overtime thriller the year before. Turns out when the game gets boring, people stop paying attention. To everything.

You're spending $8 million and gambling on whether the game stays interesting. That's not marketing strategy. That's a casino.

So what actually works?

In this week's paid edition, we're digging into the data that most brands would rather ignore:

→ The AI Gambit: One brand ditched the $8 million TV spot entirely for AI-powered activations—and saw 30% higher engagement. We break down what's actually working in AI advertising and what's still just expensive tech demos.

→ The Mascot Manifesto: Why the Energizer Bunny consistently outperforms Brad Pitt, according to four years of effectiveness research. (Spoiler: it's not even close, and the reason will annoy your creative director.)

→ The Ego Problem: Brand recall is declining. Differentiation is disappearing. Nike is skipping the whole thing to focus on the World Cup. We examine what the smartest brands are doing differently—and why the Super Bowl's grip on advertising budgets might finally be loosening.

The Super Bowl remains the last true mass-market moment in American media. But "mass" doesn't mean "effective." The brands winning this game aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the most famous faces. They're the ones who actually understand what moves the needle—and have the discipline to ignore the ego trip.

The paid edition drops now with the full analysis.

Because $8 million is too much money to spend on vibes.