Super Bowl 2025—how brands showed up on social media

The Super Bowl isn’t just the biggest advertising event of the year—it’s also one of the buzziest nights on social media. Each year, tens of millions of viewers collectively turn to their second screens to comment on their favorite (and least favorite) commercials of the night, review the halftime show performance and occasionally even discuss the football game. Super Bowl ad review The best and worst commercials from the Big Game Click here This year was no different, and dozens of brands joined netizens in commenting on the most viral moments of the Big Game and bantering with other advertisers posting throughout the evening. Humor largely dominated on social media, as was the case for many of the ads that aired during the Big Game. Brands such as Mountain Dew, Uber Eats and Lay’s shared memes and interactive posts across Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) tied to their in-game ads. Lay’s, for instance, encouraged X users to reply to the brand’s posts to receive a potato emoji or be assigned a chip flavor, while Mountain Dew posted a slew of memes drawing on the star of its Super Bowl spot—the singer Seal as an actual seal. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Mountain Dew® (@mountaindew) Totino’s leaned into dark humor to bolster its darkly comedic Super Bowl ad revolving around an alien being crushed to death, sharing a video eulogy for the deceased creature, named Chazmo, among other posts. On TikTok, Totino's shared an alternate, more graphic version of its in-game spot that includes the alien's eyeball popping out and rolling on the ground toward the group of kids that stars in the ad. Also read: How Gen Zers rated Super Bowl ads @totinos we let the guys do their thing with this one and the network did NOT like it ♬ original sound - Totino’s Pizza Rolls Beyond Meat pointed out the absurdity of many of the night’s ads, joking, “They should invent a Super Bowl commercial that makes sense.” Not every brand stuck to comedy, though. After airing its first Super Bowl spot in 27 years, Nike shared posts on X, Threads and Instagram highlighting the accomplishments of the female athletes featured in its commercial. On X and Threads, Nike kicked off its series of posts about the athletes by declaring, “Icons don’t need intros, but we'll remind you anyway.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nike (@nike) Several brands, meanwhile, acknowledged the steep cost of running a Super Bowl commercial, which hit upwards of $8 million for 30 seconds of airtime this year. AriZona Iced Tea, which has famously capped the price of its cans at 99 cents for over three decades, amassed 245,000 likes on a post on X simply stating, “I’m not gonna waste millions of dollars on a commercial.” Skittles also joked about its decision to not shell out millions on a Super Bowl ad and said its post on X was its “big game day ad.” This is my big game day ad. Any other brands feel free to get in on it.— SKITTLES (@Skittles) February 9, 2025 Ritz, which aired its first Super Bowl commercial during the game, playfully acknowledging the brief amount of screen time those millions of dollars translate to for advertisers in an X post. why did I only get 30 seconds on screen— RITZ Crackers (@Ritzcrackers) February 10, 2025 A few brands trashed the new scorebug (the on-screen graphic displaying the score of the game) Fox debuted during its Super Bowl broadcast. Pizza Hut, for example, made a lighthearted jab at former NFL tight end Rob Gronkowski, asking “Who let Gronk design the scoreboard?” But the moment that undoubtedly generated the most brand buzz of the night was Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show performance. Even before the show, brands such as Cash App and Beyond Meat made it clear that they were more interested in the halftime show than the football game surrounding it. View on Threads Dozens of brands leaned into what was arguably the most viral moment of the night: Lamar performing “Not Like Us,” a diss track about fellow rapper Drake, and grinning directly at the camera while saying, “Hey, Drake.” Lamar’s performance generated roughly 80 million social media engagements and 183,000 total posts by 11 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, according to data from social media management platform Dash Hudson. Duolingo joined Lamar in piling on Drake with a post referencing the line “Tryna strike a chord and it's probably A minor” from the song. Apple Music, the sponsor of the Halftime Show, simply repeated the phrase “They not like us” (a lyric from the song’s chorus) in an X post that garnered over 271,000 likes. @duolingo learn A minor in our music course #duolingo #duolingomusic #superbowl #fyp ♬ original sound - Duolingo United Airlines steered clear of the tension between Lamar and Drake with an X post that captioned a clip of Lamar circling the camera with “My bag watching me follow it around the carousel.” The airline racked up nearly 6 million views and 54,000 likes on that post alone, as of this writing. My bag watching me follow it around the carouselpic.twitter.com/8qUmKntkgu— United Airlines (@united) February 10, 2025 Heinz leveraged the halftime show as an opportunity to promote its recently announced partnership with Mustard, a record producer who works with Lamar, when he made an appearance during the Halftime Show to shout “mustaaaaarrrd” alongside the rapper during the song “tv off.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Heinz (@heinz) SZA, who also performed alongside Lamar during the Halftime Show, was featured in several brands’ posts about the show, too. Ulta Beauty shared several photos of SZA getting her makeup done for her Halftime Show performance as part of a partnership with the singer, while Elmo praised SZA’s performance in an X post: “May Elmo just say, Ms. @sza, YOU WERE FANTASTIC!!!” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ulta Beauty (@ultabeauty) Brand banter Of course, it’s not Super Bowl Sunday if brands aren’t bantering with one another on social media. Several brands referenced Dunkin’s Big Game ad—including Jeep and Pepsi, which both jokingly requested some of the neon orange “DunKings” tracksuits featured in the ad, and DoorDash and streaming service Max, which nodded to some of the celebrity cameos in the star-studded ad (or, in DoorDash’s case, the absence of “DunKing” Matt Damon). Hey @dunkindonuts no pressure but what exactly do we have to do to get one of those tracksuits— Jeep (@Jeep) February 9, 2025 A slew of brands also acknowledged the odd coincidence of both Little Caesars and Pringles centering their Super Bowl spots on flying facial hair. Mental health app Calm, for instance, quipped “We didn’t make a commercial because we couldn’t pull off the flying facial hair thing,” while Scrub Daddy shared a video of a soap mustache flapping away from one of its smiley face sponges. Little Caesars and Pringles, for their part, seemed to embrace the similarities between their respective commercials. The two brands shared a Collab post on Instagram with three images combining the bushy eyebrows featured in Little Caesars’ spot with the Pringles mustache. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Little Caesars (@littlecaesars) A few brands, including Cinnabon and Sam Adams, alluded to Coffee mate’s bizarre Super Bowl ad starring a dancing tongue with a mix of horror and fascination. View on Threads Olipop also opted for an indirect reference to another brand’s Super Bowl campaign in one of its posts of the night—although in Olipop’s case, its post was a snarky response to rival prebiotic soda brand Poppi’s viral (and controversial) influencer campaign, which involved Poppi loaning vending machines to roughly three dozen influencers for their Super Bowl parties. we don’t have vending machines but who wants a jersey !! https://t.co/FZtTfZc4hU— OLIPOP (@drinkolipop) February 9, 2025 Coors Light and Peloton took their banter a step further, teaming up on a handful of social posts that leaned into a scene from Coors Light’s Super Bowl ad in which a group of sloths attempt to sluggishly complete a spin class on the Monday after the Big Game. In one post, a Peloton instructor urged viewers to not skip exercise on Monday (“When I ask you ‘Are you gonna work out?’, your answer is, ‘Does a bear shit in the woods and is a sloth slow?’”), and in another, Coors Light promoted two Peloton classes as a way to “beat the case of the Mondays.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Peloton (@onepeloton)

Super Bowl 2025—how brands showed up on social media

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