Ipsos Reveals the Super Bowl's Best Ads of 2025

Flying facial hair takes the win in 2025, with Little Caesars and Pringles among the top performing ads based on hard data from Ipsos

NEW YORK, Feb. 10, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Little Caesars, Pringles, and eight other brands took home the win for Best Super Bowl ads of 2025, according to new Ipsos data. Over the past five years, Ipsos, one of the world's leading market research companies, has analyzed Super Bowl ads to determine their effectiveness based on responses from American audiences and online social conversation leading up to and during the game.

Unlike more simplistic Super Bowl ad rankings, Ipsos assesses each ad on a variety of metrics which are linked to real-world business outcomes, including the ad's ability to generate sales, build brand equity, change a perception about the brand, or generate buzz and conversation among viewers.

This year featured a great body of work — literally, body parts everywhere, from legs and breasts to facial hair and Tubi's "skin hats." In the end, some brands were head and shoulders above the rest.

These are the 10 ads that best delivered on their unique business objectives during Super Bowl LIX:

• Happy CFO — The ads that got the most bang for the buck
  • Winners: Little Caesars, "Whoa!" McKinney, and Pringles, "Call of the Mustaches," FCB New York
  • Why it worked: Who knew facial hair could fly? Pringles and Little Caesars both arrived at this out-of-the-box concept — and it paid off, with both landing in the top 1% of all Super Bowl ads tested in Ipsos' CreativeISpark method.

• Brand Purpose — The ad that does good for business and for society
  • Winner: Nike, "So Win," Wieden + Kennedy Portland
  • Why it worked: Nike set out to start a conversation about women in sports — and they achieved it, with the highest volume of social mentions seen in Ipsos' Synthesio social intelligence platform.

• Best Use of Brand Assets — The ad that didn't even need to say the brand name

• • Winner: Budweiser, "First Delivery," FCB New York
  • Why it worked: Budweiser's Clydesdales have become not only an iconic brand asset, but a familiar cast of characters that audiences look forward to seeing in the big game. This year, they received the most brand playback after the game, per Ipsos' FastFacts study.

• Understood the Assignment — The ad that was most Super Bowl-worthy
  • Winner: WeatherTech, "Whatever Comes Your Way," Pinnacle Advertising
  • Why it worked: After years of conventional, product-focused ads, WeatherTech employed their "wild grannies" to deliver the game's most humorous ad, per Ipsos' Creative|Spark research.

• The Second-Screen Sensation — The ad that went beyond the commercial break and infiltrated social conversation
  • Winner: Mountain Dew, "Kiss From a Lime," Goodby Silverstein & Partners
  • Why it worked: Seal as a seal — an entertaining, yet polarizing execution, which yielded a Social Power in the top 5% of Ipsos' Creative|Spark database and trending mentions on platforms like TikTok.

• The Misfit Mindset — The ad that broke conventions to spark brand growth
  • Winner: Novartis, "Your Attention, Please," Merkley and Partners
  • Why it worked: Novartis bucked the trend of healthcare advertising, performing significantly above Super Bowl benchmarks on both creativity and empathy in a powerful spot that shines a spotlight on breast cancer awareness. 

• Blast from the Past — The ad that best tapped into nostalgia
  • Winner: Hellmann's, "When Sally Met Hellmann's," VML
  • Why it worked: Thanks to a potent blend of nostalgia, humor and star power, Hellmann's performed above Ipsos' Super Bowl benchmarks on memorability and social power.

• Didn't Make the Cut — The best Super Bowl-worthy ad that wasn't aired
  • Winner: Doritos, "Barbershop," Zach Shenouda and Ryan Robinson
  • Why it worked: With a culturally authentic setting and a cringeworthy, laugh-out-loud twist, this ad placed in the top 1% of all Super Bowl ads in the Ipsos Creative|Spark database.

• The AI+HI Hero — The ad that best leveraged artificial intelligence with human intelligence
  • Winner: Google, "Dream Job"
  • Why it worked: By highlighting tangible uses of AI through an empathetic, human-centric lens, Google landed a top 10% performer to drive long-term equity, according to Ipsos' Creative|Spark research.

Here's how audiences reacted to the ads this year on the whole:

• Viewers thought the positive use of celebrities and general entertainment were in line with previous years.
• Audiences noticed a decreased emphasis on diversity & inclusion, with 17% feeling this year's ads provided less diversity than previous years, per Ipsos' post-game FastFacts study.
• 1 in 3 found the ads more humorous than last year, per Ipsos' post-game FastFacts study.

"This year was a triumph for creativity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the climate, brands either 'played it safe' or 'stayed in their lane' strategically, depending on how you see it," said Pedr Howard, Head of Ipsos Creative Excellence U.S. "But that meant that visual metaphors, storytelling, and a disturbing amount of body parts were used in a way that delivered some of the most memorable ads in years. There was also a welcome shift towards ads with a long-term focus on brand-building."

Methodology: This year, Ipsos used a proprietary blend of quantitative and qualitative data sources to provide a fast, agile and accurate look at the holistic performance of Super Bowl commercials, including:

• Creative|Spark: ads were tested for robust evaluation for creative effectiveness. Sample: 150 U.S. adults 18-65 per ad. The average range for Creative & Equity Effect is between 70-130.
• FastFacts: After the game, Ipsos surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults 18-65 on its Ipsos.Digital platform.
• Ipsos Synthesio: An AI-enabled consumer intelligence platform that tracks and analyzes 4.9 million Super Bowl-related social mentions.

To view more Ipsos Super Bowl research, visit HERE

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SOURCE Ipsos