The Best Big Game Commercials

Originally published February 2014. Edited on Jun 29, 2026.

Super Bowl XLVIII produced the four most-studied commercials of the early-2010s ad cycle. Budweiser's Puppy Love built the pre-release playbook every brand has used since. The Muppets Most Wanted spot proved the IP-and-irreverence formula. The Full House reunion for Dannon Oikos turned nostalgia into a national news cycle. And Ellen DeGeneres's Beats Music spot demonstrated that the celebrity ambassador is sometimes worth more than the product placement underneath. Twelve years on, each one still teaches something operational.

Budweiser — Puppy Love

The Clydesdales were back. This time they adopted a Labrador puppy. The two animals spent sixty seconds bonding in the most calibrated emotional spot of the decade. The genius was the pre-release strategy. Budweiser dropped the spot on YouTube five days before the game. The video crossed 30 million views before kickoff. The actual in-game airing was an amplification event, not the launch.

Anheuser-Busch had run the same play with the prior year's Brotherhood spot. Puppy Love confirmed the pattern. The pre-release model — leak the emotional spot early, let the social cycle build, use the in-game placement as the second wave — became the default for category-leading advertisers. Every Super Bowl since has run on the model Budweiser locked in across 2013-2014.

The Muppets — Muppets Most Wanted

Toyota paid the Muppets to hijack a Highlander. Terry Crews drove. Statler and Waldorf heckled. Miss Piggy demanded the AUX cord. The Muppets Most Wanted theatrical release was three weeks out. Toyota got a vehicle spot. Disney got a movie trailer. Both got the irreverent humor the Muppet franchise had carried since 1976 and the licensed-IP halo the spot bought into.

The model is now standard. A category brand pays for a licensed IP collision. The IP gets a launch. The brand gets the personality. The audience gets a sixty-second short film that does not feel like an advertisement. Twelve years later, the most-watched Super Bowl spots in the category follow the same architecture.

Dannon Oikos — The Full House Reunion

John Stamos, Bob Saget, and Dave Coulier reunited for the first time in seventeen years to sell Greek yogurt. The spot leaned hard on the kitchen-sink nostalgia the original sitcom had built across eight seasons of ABC's TGIF block. The cultural payoff was outsized. Netflix announced Fuller House the following year. The reunion's tone — adults playing the same comic beats they ran as twentysomethings — set the template for the entire 2010s revival cycle that followed.

The strategic lesson is about which property to revive and when. Dannon Oikos picked a sitcom whose original audience had aged into prime yogurt-purchasing demographics. The nostalgia was not generic. It was demographically targeted. The reunion only worked because the audience that had loved the original was now the audience the brand needed to reach.

Beats Music — Ellen DeGeneres

Beats Music launched on January 21, 2014, just under two weeks before the game. Ellen DeGeneres anchored the Super Bowl spot. She tap-danced with little pigs in red wigs to a re-recorded Goldilocks scoring. The product placement was thin. The Ellen brand carried it.

The spot is now studied as the canonical case of celebrity ambassador outweighing product clarity. Most viewers came away knowing Ellen had endorsed something musical and not much more. Apple acquired Beats Electronics — including Beats Music — five months later for $3 billion. The Music product was wound down and absorbed into Apple Music in 2015. The spot itself outlasted the product. So did the ambassador model.

What 2014 established

Three structural patterns came out of the XLVIII cycle and have held across every Super Bowl since.

Pre-release is the launch. The game is the amplifier. Budweiser proved it. Every category leader now drops the spot early. The audience that watches the in-game ad is the second wave, not the first.

Licensed IP collisions are the dominant format. The Toyota-Muppets model — brand pays IP, IP gets launch, brand gets personality — is now the default architecture for major in-game placements. Audiences read sixty-second branded IP shorts as entertainment, not advertising.

Reunion economics are demographically specific. The Full House reunion worked because the original audience had aged into the brand's buyer. Reunion strategies that miss the demographic targeting — and there have been many across the past decade — produce nostalgia without conversion. The lesson is repeatable but not universal.

Super Bowl advertising is not the same business it was in February 2014. The pre-release playbook, the IP collision format, and the demographically-targeted reunion all originated in this cycle. The biggest spots of every Super Bowl since are running variations on what these four ads established.