By Kimeko McCoy  •  February 10, 2026  •

Anthropic took a jab at OpenAI’s ad product launch and T-Mobile and Coinbase used The Backstreet Boys top play up millennial nostalgia. Meanwhile, Dunkin’ and Xfinity stacked celebs in their ad spots (jury’s out whether generative AI or CGI was used to make the celebs look younger.) All said, a few things were clear: AI platforms like OpenAI and Google are becoming Super Bowl ad regulars, celebs are still the go-to Big Game strategy and in a high-stakes cultural landscape, and sports betting is the new American past time.

For the past few years, advertisers have been treading lightly. Against a backdrop of Minneapolis ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, mass layoffs and other cultural tensions, advertisers played it safe. This year’s Super Bowl ads were mostly about living in harmony, lighthearted jokes and heartwarming moments.

Still, there were standouts like Pepsi, Squarespace and Anthropic.

“Most of the advertisers tried to take some big swings. Some of them didn’t land as probably as they were intended,” Sunny Bonnell, co-founder and CEO of the branding agency Motto, said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. She later added, “I also think people took a lot of swings at trying to inject more humor, given the landscape that we’re all in.”

Bonnell joined the Digiday Podcast for Super Bowl superlatives to determine the best and worst ads with influencers, celebs and nostalgia. Tune into the full episode to hear the best and worst overall ad spot from the Big Game.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Best/worst AI ads

Bonnell: Anthropic probably understood the moment better than any AI brand on the field. Instead of showcasing the power or possibility, it really addressed the elephant [ads in AI chatbot platforms] in the room.

McCoy: I was sitting in a room of people who are not neither advertisers nor people who are chronically online. So to them, it just looked like a ChatGPT ad.

Peterson: Worst? ai.com. That was one of those ads were, as I was watching, I was like, “What the hell is this?…Part of the reason why I didn’t like it is it reminded me of Pets.com. It felt like the clearest thing we’ll potentially look back at a year from now, five years from now, when the economy has cratered because of AI, as that was the “.com” bubble.

Best/worst nostalgia play

Peterson: Budweiser with the eagle in the Clydesdale ad, just because that was so America, the great and all of that at just the wrong time for America. That felt like a nostalgia play for an era that definitely doesn’t exist now, and I don’t know that ever really existed in this country.

Bonnell: Knowing the Levi’s brand for a really long time, what I’ve always associated them with is a bit of an explorer archetype, where they’ve always been about the open road and discovery, and this landscape of enjoying the journey, and the jeans are part of that. But this [commercial] just felt like it didn’t feel true to the brand.

Best/worst celebrity appearance

Peterson: I’ve got Dunkin’ for best. It just had among the most celebrities, but it also felt like it used them in a good way — deep fakes aside.

Bonnell: Emma Stone in Squarespace. She’s such a phenomenal actress, and her acting is so good that it brought urgency to a product that a lot of people don’t even think about as much anymore…She’s such a huge actress in terms of global visibility, and she’s won all types of awards. To have her in a ad like that was a big risk. And yet, at the same time, it really paid off.

McCoy: The best use of celebrity to me was Bosch with Guy Fieri. It was the closest that we would have gotten to the Super Bowl ads that I grew up with, where it was cheeky and unexpected to come from Bosch.