The Philadelphia Eagles’ decisive 40-22 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in this year’s Super Bowl was cause for celebration among Eagles fans, but preliminary data suggests that advertisers might not have as much reason to cheer.
Average unaided brand awareness for Super Bowl advertisers, meaning the share of people who can name an advertiser from the game without being given a list, dropped slightly from 2024 to 2025, according to data that marketing analytics company Big Chalk shared exclusively with Marketing Brew. Proper attribution, or the share of people able to name a brand based on a description of its ad, declined even more dramatically. Both factors could be concerning for marketers who shelled out up to $8 million for 30 seconds of ad time in this year’s broadcast.
“A bad game can be bad for brands,” Big Chalk partner Rick Miller said. “I can’t tell you with definitiveness that this is going to hurt sales, but it’s not a good indicator.”
Forget about it
The average unaided awareness among the top 10 performing brands in last year’s game—one of only two Super Bowls to go into overtime, when the Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers by just 3 points—was 10%, according to Big Chalk. That figure dropped to 8.5% this year.
Several of last year’s top 10 brands improved their unaided awareness scores, including Ad Meter winner Budweiser, which jumped from 13% unaided awareness last year to about 22% this year, per Big Chalk. Doritos’s unaided awareness score increased from about 13% after the 2024 game to about 15% this year, and Bud Light saw a small increase, from 8.6% to 9.2%.
Other brands, like Mountain Dew, Michelob Ultra, Pringles, and Hellmann’s, joined the top 10 brands in terms of unaided awareness after not making the cut last year. Nike and Jeep also made the top 10 this year (although neither advertised in the 2024 broadcast).
Overall, though, brands with the highest unaided awareness scores had lower scores compared to last year, hence the decline. Dunkin’, which scored 20% unaided awareness in 2024, saw its unaided awareness drop to 9.5% this year. And brands that were not among the top 10 performers this year “suffered even worse declines,” Miller wrote in a report on the findings.
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There could be a few reasons for the decline, including the quality of the ads themselves, but Miller said the lopsided game was the more likely suspect. With that said, this year’s Super Bowl broadcast brought in record-breaking viewership for Fox.
Plot holes
While unaided awareness can be an important metric, it’s not the only indicator of ad performance, Miller said. Big Chalk also tracks proper attribution by ad plot or celebrity endorser, meaning Miller and his team describe the stars or premise of an ad to Super Bowl viewers and then ask them to name the brand, which he said can be a “more direct comparison of how the ad actually engaged” viewers than unaided awareness.
But that figure was also lower this year, with the average attribution score down more than 20 percentage points from about 44% last year to about 22% this year.
Of the eight brands Big Chalk measured after selecting them at random, Reese’s had the highest proper attribution score, at about 34%, for its volcanic ad promoting the Chocolate Lava Big Cup. Michelob Ultra followed with a score of about 32% for its pickleball-themed ad starring Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara. By comparison, last year’s top performers, State Farm and Doritos, scored about 56% and about 54%, respectively.
Both Reese’s and Michelob Ultra ran their ads in the first half of the game, while the other six brands Big Chalk tested ran second-half ads, Miller said, which could be an indicator that viewers started tuning out after the halftime show.
“In part, that’s the gamble you take as a Super Bowl advertiser,” he said. “You’re not just gambling on your creative. You’re not just gambling on the message that you’re trying to execute. You’re gambling, a little bit, that the game is going to keep people engaged, and this year, it just didn’t seem to do that.”
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