Live Events Aren’t What They Used to Be — And the Super Bowl Proves It

Live events are having a unique moment.

With Super Bowl LX and the Winter Olympics occurring on the same weekend, advertisers are not just competing for attention. They are navigating a far more complex, cross-platform live ecosystem. This convergence adds a new layer to an already fragmented media environment, where live no longer means one place, one screen, or one audience.

Today, live is everywhere.

From Broadcast to Video Everywhere

Super Bowl LX was not confined to a single broadcast feed. It was live across NBC, Peacock, and Telemundo, bringing localization, language, personalization, and platform-specific experiences into the picture. This marks the shift from broadcast to narrowcast, where one moment exists in many versions at the same time.

In parallel, user-generated content is inseparable from live events. Social platforms move at the same speed as the game itself, with reactions, memes, creator content, and brand integrations unfolding in real time. The Super Bowl is no longer just something you watch—it is something you experience across feeds, formats, and communities simultaneously.

“Live sports are no longer experienced on a single screen, and measurement can’t be either. When the Super Bowl is simulcast across environments, advertisers need to understand how their brand shows up everywhere the audience is watching. That’s exactly what MediaRadar is built to capture.” — Gray Wheatley, MediaRadar Product Manager

The Old Super Bowl Model No Longer Applies

Historically, the Super Bowl represented mass reach without precision. Advertisers bought into the promise of scale, and Nielsen ratings served as the primary currency. The implicit deal was simple. Trust us, everyone will see it.

That world no longer exists.

Consumers now have clear preferences. They decide where they watch, how they watch, and which platforms, languages, and voices they engage with. Live events compress the timing back into a single moment, which makes simulcast distribution more important than ever. However, reach alone is no longer enough. Understanding how brands show up across every live surface is now critical.

This Is Where MediaRadar Comes In

For the first time, MediaRadar has captured the full Super Bowl simulcast experience across systems.

Our Ad Intelligence reflects the reality of modern advertising. It spans linear television, CTV, streaming, and social, all connected. On the same weekend as the Super Bowl, MediaRadar also captured advertising activity across the Winter Olympics and live NBA programming. This creates a unified view of how brands appeared across multiple, overlapping live moments.

MediaRadar provides advertising intelligence as a true currency. It is not siloed by channel. It reflects how audiences actually consume media today.

CTV Was Just the First Step

The move from broadcast to narrowcast did not begin with live events. It began with CTV, when streaming transformed television into a multi-platform experience.

But the evolution continues.

Today’s live moments blend linear TV, CTV and streaming, social video and creator ecosystems. Together, these formats create a single, expansive live experience.

“CTV was the first real signal that video was no longer tied to a single screen. What we’re seeing now with live sports is the next phase of that evolution, where the same moment is experienced across broadcast, streaming, and social at once. Video everywhere changes how brands show up and how they need to be measured.” — Wheatley

To understand a brand’s identity at Super Bowl LX, marketers need a view that transcends formats and captures the entire advertising ecosystem, not just one screen or one rating.

At this moment, MediaRadar is the only platform that can deliver that perspective.

What This Looked Like in Practice

Below are examples of brands that activated during Super Bowl LX across platforms and formats.

Sponsorship Still Wins, Especially in the Moments Viewers Trust Most

Sponsorship remains one of the most powerful ways to build association during live sports, particularly when it is tied to premium programming moments that viewers perceive as part of the event itself.

Toyota is a strong example. As the Official Automotive Partner of the NFL, Toyota secured sponsorship of the halftime report, using that high-attention segment to spotlight the RAV4 alongside its long-running tagline, “Let’s Go Places.”

Rather than competing inside the commercial pod, Toyota used sponsorship to reinforce brand presence in a moment that feels integrated, credible, and difficult to ignore.

New Products Thrive When They Feel Like Culture

Live events remain one of the best stages for pushing new products, especially when brands use the moment to introduce something new with personality, humor, and instant recognizability.

Nerds used Super Bowl LX to highlight its newest innovation, Nerds Juicy Gummy Clusters, with a spot designed to feel loud, playful, and impossible to ignore. In the ad, Andy Cohen cheers alongside a larger-than-life gummy character and delivers the line: “To best buds. Taste buds! We got to show the world the new you!”

The creative leans into Nerds’ signature world of bold color and candy chaos to create a character-driven moment that feels built for replay, social sharing, and post-game conversation.

Highlighting How Live Moments Lift Other Events

Super Bowl LX became a platform not just for product and brand messages, but also for future event awareness tied directly to sports culture.

One standout was the early activation around the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, even though the Games are still more than two years away. The creative encouraged viewers to register for the LA28 Olympic ticket draw and explicitly called out that men’s and women’s flag football will be part of the LA28 Olympic program — a direct tie back to the NFL.

This type of presence is strategic on two levels. First, it places the Olympics into the cultural conversation right now by meeting audiences where they already are. Second, it links future sports programming with contemporary fandom, signaling how major properties are beginning to build momentum years in advance through shared moments.

Storytelling Turns the Super Bowl Into a Season-Long Event

Uber Eats proved that the Super Bowl hits harder when it is the climax of a story fans have been watching all season.

The brand’s “Football Is Just Selling Food” campaign built throughout the NFL season, with Bradley Cooper leading the charge and arguing that football’s real job is to make fans hungry. That setup paid off around the Super Bowl, when Matthew McConaughey entered as a playful antagonist, raising the stakes right as attention peaked.

In the lead-up to the game, Uber Eats also put the spotlight on fan engagement. A week ahead of Super Bowl Sunday, the brand launched an in-app ad creator and promoted the experience directly in its Super Bowl advertising. Fans were invited to build their own version of a Super Bowl ad by choosing scenes, adding celebrity cameos, and shaping the story themselves. With 1,000+ possible ad variations and integrations including Pepsi, Uber Eats turned the Super Bowl spot into a call to action, pulling viewers into the app and extending the campaign well beyond the broadcast.

The Battle of AI Took Center Stage

AI was everywhere during Super Bowl LX, with multiple platforms using the game to define what artificial intelligence actually means for everyday life.

Amazon leaned into anxiety with a comical “AI takeover” narrative for Alexa, while Anthropic took a more contrarian stance, poking at OpenAI by reiterating that it does not run ads at all. Genspark.ai focused on productivity, positioning AI as a way to get your work done faster so you can take a day off. Google Gemini leaned emotional, using image creation to tell a warm story about a mother and son planning their new home.

But the clear winner of the moment was OpenAI, which didn’t rely on a single Super Bowl spot. Instead, the brand ran a coordinated set of ads in tandem, each reinforcing a different part of the story. OpenAI debuted a new tagline, “You can just build things,” positioning Codex as a tool that makes it dramatically easier to create and ship no-code apps. Alongside that message, the broader campaign highlighted practical everyday Chat GPT use cases, from fitness and cooking to planning and decision-making. Lastly, they grounded the technology in emotion through a heartwarming story of a woman taking over her multi-generational family farm with help from ChatGPT.

In a year crowded with AI messaging, OpenAI stood out by making AI feel practical, human, and ready for real life.

The New Currency of Live Advertising

Super Bowl LX made one thing clear. The era of one broadcast, one rating, and one story is over. Live events now unfold across platforms, languages, formats, and feeds, and the brands that win are the ones that show up consistently across the entire ecosystem.

That is why modern Super Bowl analysis cannot stop at a single network view or a single measurement system. To understand who truly dominated the weekend, marketers need a unified, cross-platform lens that captures the full simulcast reality of live advertising — and MediaRadar is proud to deliver it.