Super Bowl Sponsorship Performance: Where Brand Value Is Really Created

The Super Bowl is the biggest stage in sports, but for team sponsors, it’s not a level playing field. With league-controlled media rights, national ad inventory, and limited team-owned broadcast assets, brands must be strategic about where and how they generate value. This year’s big game highlighted three channels that defined sponsor impact: Social, Broadcast, and In-Venue.

Social: The One Channel Participating Teams Truly Control

For the two teams playing in the Super Bowl, most of their traditional sponsorship inventory effectively disappears.

One channel becomes disproportionately important: team-owned social media.

Instagram, TikTok, X, and Facebook become the primary guaranteed avenues for delivering sponsor impressions and measurable brand value. And during the Super Bowl window, those channels operate at peak performance. Engagement spikes. National attention expands reach well beyond core fan bases. Content becomes culturally relevant in real time.

From arrival tunnel shots and locker room content to hype videos, touchdown graphics, and postgame celebrations, every post becomes premium inventory. Logos embedded into creative, tagged partners, sponsored story frames, co-branded graphics, and integrated product placement allow teams to create intentional exposure at scale — without relying on league-controlled broadcast inventory.

The difference in output can be significant. On February 8th, Super Bowl Sunday, the Seattle Seahawks generated $10.9M in social brand value and 23.7M engagements across 295 posts. The New England Patriots generated $2.6M in brand value and 4.6M engagements across 176 posts. The gap underscores how championship momentum, content velocity, and deliberate partner integration amplify results when national attention is at its highest.

Data pulled from Super Bowl, February 8th

Execution matters just as much as volume. One Seahawks post styled as a celebratory newspaper front page announcing “Super Bowl LX Champions” seamlessly integrated Lumen into the creative. It generated $37.8K in brand value and 126.0K engagements. The brand did not interrupt the moment, it was built into it. That’s what effective Super Bowl social looks like: native, authentic, and measurable.

The opportunity also extends beyond the final whistle. During the Super Bowl parade on February 11th, the Seahawks continued to feature sponsors prominently. A Bud Light–integrated trophy celebration post alone generated $21.5K in brand value and 51.3K engagements. Across parade coverage, the Seahawks drove 1.8M engagements, with Bud Light accounting for approximately 1.2M of that total. When teams plan for the extended championship window, sponsor value compounds days after the game ends.

Even without a title, social remains critical. The Patriots leaned into their long-standing Gillette partnership through sponsored player arrival content. Drake Maye’s Instagram arrival video generated $65.5K in partner value and more than 100K engagements. Arrival shots and pregame coverage offer structured integration opportunities that guarantee exposure regardless of game outcome.

The broader takeaway is straightforward. During the Super Bowl, broadcast control shifts to the league. Commercial airtime belongs to national advertisers. In-venue exposure is constrained. Social media is the one channel teams fully own — where inventory is flexible, timing is controlled, and sponsor integration is measurable.

For participating teams and their partners, that makes social media the most reliable and scalable mechanism for delivering brand value on the biggest stage in sports.

Broadcast: A League-Owned Platform Favors National Brands

On the broadcast side, the equation shifts even more dramatically.

Team-level inventory that typically drives measurable value throughout the regular season is largely unavailable. There are no jersey patch activations to leverage. Commercial inventory is fully controlled at the league level. Even many in-game brand integrations are tied to NFL-wide sponsorship agreements, not individual team partnerships. That structure inherently favors national brands with league deals.

Super Bowl commercial slots remain the most expensive and visible inventory in sports. While exact pricing varies year to year, 30-second placements consistently rank among the highest-cost media buys on television. In exchange, brands receive unmatched scale: guaranteed primetime exposure, premium storytelling moments, and coordinated amplification across digital, social, and earned media before, during, and after the game. For national advertisers with league alignment, the Super Bowl is a controlled, high-impact platform designed for reach at scale.

For team-level partners, however, that same structure limits opportunity. Even in-venue broadcast pickup — LED boards, ribbon boards, static signage — is constrained compared to a regular-season game. Camera focus centers on gameplay, national ads, and league moments. Any in-venue exposure that does appear on broadcast credits to the host stadium’s inventory rather than the competing teams’ usual assets.

In this Super Bowl, for example, the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium — as the host venue — delivered premium exposure for its stadium partners on football’s biggest stage, despite the 49ers not being one of the competing teams. That dynamic underscores an important point: broadcast exposure during the Super Bowl is dictated by league structure and venue ownership, not competitive participation alone.

The net effect is straightforward. The brands positioned to extract maximum broadcast value from the Super Bowl are those aligned at the league level or those tied to the host venue. It is fundamentally a scale-driven environment, and national advertisers dominate it.

For participating teams and their individual partners, broadcast is not the controllable growth lever.

Halftime Show: A TV-First Event Creates Unexpected Value for In-Venue Assets

The Super Bowl halftime show is one of the most-watched live entertainment moments in the world, but it is fundamentally a television production.

While tens of thousands of fans are inside the stadium, the overwhelming majority of the audience is watching from home. As a result, staging, lighting, camera choreography, graphics, and augmented effects are typically designed first for broadcast. The in-stadium experience often mirrors what is being shown on the videoboards rather than what can be seen directly on the field. In practice, many attendees shift their attention from the physical stage to the stadium screens to follow the performance as it was intended to be viewed.

That shift in attention creates a unique value environment for host and league-aligned sponsors.

Super Bowl LX Halftime Show

When fans inside the venue are focused on screens, any brand integrated into the halftime presentation effectively captures both audiences at once: the global broadcast audience and the in-stadium audience watching the videoboards. In this Super Bowl, Levi’s — as the 49ers’ naming rights partner — and Bud Light, as a league sponsor were connected to the videoboard and thus structurally positioned to benefit from that dynamic.

Their advantage came from:

• Prominent integration within the halftime show presentation

• Brand visibility embedded within stadium screen production

• Repeated exposure during performance transitions and programmed moments

Because attention consolidates around screens rather than static signage, these integrations function almost like a secondary broadcast layer inside the stadium. Unlike traditional in-venue assets — LED boards, ribbon boards, or static signage that rely on incidental camera pickup — halftime show integrations are deliberate, centrally produced, and repeatedly shown.

It is one of the rare moments during the Super Bowl when in-venue attention aligns directly with broadcast production, creating concentrated exposure for brands embedded in the show’s presentation.

That said, it is important to keep the scale in perspective. The halftime show typically runs approximately 20 minutes within a broadcast that can exceed four hours. While the show delivers a high-intensity exposure window, it represents only a fraction of the total event runtime. The remainder of the game — pregame, gameplay, stoppages, and postgame — still provides significantly more cumulative opportunity for in-venue visibility across traditional and rotational assets.

The halftime show may be the most culturally talked-about segment, but from a total exposure standpoint, it is one concentrated moment within a much larger inventory landscape.

Final Takeaway: Control Determines Value

The Super Bowl proves that sponsorship performance isn’t just about scale, it’s about ownership.

• Teams own and operate their own social media presence, and can intentionally deliver sponsor impressions.

• The league (NFL) owns exclusive TV broadcast rights, favoring national advertisers.

• In-venue moments for host venues are tied to TV production and create hybrid exposure opportunities.

For brands, the lesson is clear: aligning sponsorship strategy with asset control determines ROI. At the biggest event in sports, value doesn’t just come from being present, it comes from being positioned.