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For the first time in 27 years, we saw a Nike commercial in the Super Bowl. Has it really been that long? Hard to believe that one ofif not theworlds greatest marketing brands hasnt been on the big game stage for almost three decades. Hare Jordan is arguably a Top 10 all-time Super Bowl ad. Blame complacency, the fragmentation of media and culture, or whatever you like, but getting the swoosh back to the Super Bowl just feels right. Not only that, but the brand is using this opportunity to re-establish its hardcore athlete bonafides, in case anyone forgot. Created with Wieden+Kennedy, and narrated by Grammy winner Doechii, here we get a cranked up, black and white film, set to Led Zeppelins Whole Lotta Love. It features top athletes like ballers Caitlin Clark, Aja Wilson, JuJu Watkins and Sabrina Ionescu; footballer Alexia Putellas, tennis star Aryna Sabalenka, sprinter ShaCarri Richardson, and more, all showing the various ways they’re proving critics wrong. Chief marketing officer Nicole Hubbard Graham says the brand returned to the Super Bowl in order to tap into one of the very few mass, shared cultural experiences we have left. Thinking about the Super Bowl and thinking about this moment, it felt very timely to tell this athlete story, says Graham. Women are just absolutely shattering records right now, selling out stadiums, ticket sales, commanding contracts like you’ve never seen before, and being placed with probably some of the harshest expectations of how you’re supposed to act. And I think they will redefine what it means to be athletes and personalities of the future. Down on your luck. No one believes. The odds are stacked. Nike is using the most reliable premise in all epic sports stories to not only make a point about any individual athlete, and the state of womens sports, but also to give a not-so subtle middle finger to all the shade the brand itself has been thrown over the past year or so. Attitude adjustment Soon after Graham took over as CMO, her first order of business was to talk to the brands elite stable of athletes. What she heard most often was the notion of winning had a losing reputation in the world. The whole idea of being maniacally focused and obsessive and following your dreams to no end was sort of becoming a little bit taboo in society, says Graham. We thought that was a really interesting insight. And that led to the Olympic work. Winning Isnt For Everyone was an ode to the uncompromisingly competitive. Narrated by Willem Dafoe, the work was reminiscent of Nikes campaign for the 1996 Olympic Summer Games in Atlanta that featured the tagline, You dont win silver, you lose gold. As I wrote at the time, the new Olympic work marked a return of the f**k you attitude in Nike advertising that taps into its hardcore athlete pedigree. The Super Bowl campaign is the start of a larger campaign that will run into 2025, all looking to tap back into Nikes connection to athletes by using the same foundations of style and emotion that built the brand in decades past. This brand wasn’t built on Google ads or clicks, it was built on feelings, and big, disruptive, irreverent, emotional ideas. says Graham. That has been a really important strategy for us, and obviously with our partners at Wieden. How do we make sure that we are very much athletes over algorithms? Bigger picture The brand will need all the emotional power it can get to counter the headwinds it’s been facing. Last summer, Nike saw its biggest stock drop since 2001. Second-quarter revenue dipped by 8%. The brand is up against steep competition across major sports like running, thanks to a resurgent Adidas and Brooks, as well as newer players like On and Hoka. Critics point to a lack of innovation, being more about streetwear Air Jordans and Dunks than performance products. Emarketer senior analyst Zak Stambor says that the brand has taken a lot of steps to identify its problems and to right the ship. Getting back to iconic advertising is just a piece of it. For all of Nike’s challenges, the power of the brand remains incredibly strong, says Stambor. If the marketing can lean on that core strength, it likely will resonate. Then comes the need for everything else. You don’t want the marketing to drive the ship, it should be following the lead of the innovation, but it’s still a significant part of the puzzle. Last year, particularly with the arrival of Graham, the brand started its mission to get back to the strategy co-founder Phil Knight espoused: First capture the market for hard core athletes with innovative performance gear, and the casual consumer will follow. Graham agrees and describes Nikes biggest strength as a triangle that is built on its athlete partnerships. Unique insights lead to innovative products, which are then talked about through aspirational and inspiring ways. The work appears to be backing that up. Executives said on a recent earnings call that there are truly transformative sneakers coming for spring of 2025. Last week, the brand revealed Aja Wilsons long-awaited signature shoe, to much fanfare. We’re getting back to that trifecta, says Graham. That is our winning playbook, and that’s what you’re going to see from us over and over and over again. If Nike cant be iconic, its going to push its hardest to be iconic.
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The challenge is formidable: Create an ad campaign that somehow shows a brands integral role in a pivotal moment of human history. But also, like, make it fun? When OpenAIs ChatGPT hit 100 million users two months after its launch in November 2022, a UBS study declared it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Now at upwards of 400 million users, ChatGPT might be the best-known consumer product to invest the least in advertising. Historic product awareness, zero brand awareness. For OpenAI chief marketing officer Kate Rouch, the Super Bowl was the perfect stage to start telling the world what the brand actually means. Obviously, 130 million people are watching this, says Rouch. ChatGPT has 400 million users worldwide, so it’s not a niche technology. But we do have an opportunity to help them understand both the historical moment we’re in as well as the fact that they can participate today in this new movement and use these tools right now. The ad cleverly uses ChatGPT’s cursor dot to show people how it thinks. Set to cheerful music, we see eras of human progress animated in the dots. From fire to the wheel to agriculture, trains, the lightbulb, air travel, space exploration, and computing, until we see the tagline, All progress has a starting point. Its a conscious move to embed the product in the brand message. Rouch made a similar move back in the 2022 Super Bowl, when she was CMO at Coinbase. The crypto exchanges floating QR code ad went viral and drove so many people to its platform that the app crashed. When you ask ChatGPT a question, the dot comes up, and that is actually expressed in other OpenAI products as part of the brand design that we just refreshed, says Rouch. People are sitting around at Super Bowl parties, and they’re going to be like, Whoa, hey do you use ChatGPT? How do you use it? And they’ll pull out their phones. Building the brand The Super Bowl ad comes at a compelling time for the OpenAI and ChatGPT brand. Long the leader in awareness, the recent launch of DeepSeek has added a new element of competition for what AI tools will be in peoples pockets. Given its head start, Rouchs focus is on talking to the 400 million people who have been using ChatGPT about what exactly it can do. While we all worry about the impending robot apocalypse or hail a new technological age, theres a massive gray area between that existential level and using generative AI to help you write a better email. The brands job is to bridge that divide. What we’re attempting to do here is two things, says Rouch. Find that middle ground, which is to say, on one hand it is important that people understand this isn’t status quo. This is the dawn of the intelligence age. There’s something important happening historically here that you should know about. But also that this is a tool in your pocket right now that can do tons of interesting things for you. Thats where the Super Bowl ad comes in. Connecting the dots To create OpenAIs first major brand ad, Rouch enlisted Accenture Song CEO David Droga and his agency, which have created many Super Bowl ads for brands. The agency’s approacha peppy, product-first narrativehas a familiar connection to work Drogas namesake agency Droga5 made for the original Google Pixel back in 2016. Back then, it was the search bar transforming into a phone. Here, its the dots illustrating the historical context of these new AI tools. In both cases, the message comes through loud and clear: This technology is about to change your life. Droga and Song have long been bullish on AI. In 2023, Song parent company Accenture announced it would spend $3 billion on AI over three years, and Droga has talked about the impact generative AI would have on advertising creative, emphasizing these tools would allow humans to create better ideas quicker and more often. Many brands start thinking about their Super Bowl work in the summer. Rouch started her job in December. She says the ad itself was created with humans, but the concepting and experimentation on ideas did utilize AI tools like OpenAIs video GenAI tool Sora. We use it as a concepting tool, so nothing you see in the ad was created by Sora, says Rouch. But because we made this on a pretty compressed timeline, it really helped the creatives prototype, experiment with camera angles, and things like that, all to speed up the process. For OpenAI, the Super Bowl is an announcement of its ambition to go beyond a ubiquitous product and become the next iconic tech brand. Its got the hype, now Rouch is looking to add the emotion to its brand. At OpenAI, the mission is to create safe AGI, or advanced artificial intelligence, that benefits all of humanity, says Rouch. That’s a very intentional mission, so you will see that in our ambition and approach to build the brand and interact with people.
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If the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl on Sunday, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the rest of their teammates will have bragging rights as the National Football League (NFL)s first three-peat winners. Theyll also bag a cool $171,000 for the game, each. Before Philadelphia fans accuse the Chiefs of getting special treatment, yes, Eagles players will earn the same amount if they win. And whichever team leaves New Orleans without the Lombardi Trophy will still get a decent consolation prize: A $96,000 paycheck per player. Super Bowl contenders are receiving a better pay raise than most Americans did this year; the game paycheck is about 4.3% higher for the winners than in 2024 and about 7.9% higher for the losers. Still, those paychecks mean that many players, not just the stars, may take a pay cut to get knocked around on the field. And the amounts start to look downright paltry, especially considering how much money is shelled out for all-things Super Bowl each February. The price of entry is steep, no matter how you participate. While ticket sales plummeted in the week leading up to the Chiefs-Eagles matchup, the cheapest seats still cost more than $3,000. Meanwhile, some companies have reportedly spent $8 million or more for 30-second spots that will be among a broad variety of ads playing during breaks in the action. And Americans are projected to legally wager a record nearly $1.4 billion on the big game this year. How Postseason Paychecks are set Even as more money will be shelled out ahead of Sundays gamefrom beer to snacks to new TVs to jerseysthe paychecks for the players wont budge. Rather, the compensation rates for the winning and losing teams were set back in March 2020 as part of the NFLs Collective Bargaining Agreement, which is effective through the 2030 season. The way players are compensated for postseason action is one of a few key differences from the regular season. Players are generally paid their annual salary on a weekly basis over the course of the regular 18-game season, but those paychecks stop once the postseason begins. Instead, the league specifies how much players are compensated for each of the playoff gameswin or losewhich ranged from $49,500 to $54,500 for this years wild card and division playoff games, then bumped up to $77,000 for the conference championship games. The league has up to 15 days to pay players for each postseason game. All told, the postseason amounts to more than $350,000 in additional compensation for players on this years winning Super Bowl team and $275,000-plus for those players on the losing team. And even players on the teams who dont see any playing time are due a paycheck, so long as they are on the official 53-player roster, active/inactive list or reserve/injured list. The league’s billion-dollar enterprise Meanwhile, the NFL is on the hook to pay some $75 million-plus to the hundreds of players across the 14 teams that were in the playoffs this season, including more than $14 million to the Chiefs and Eagles players after Sundays Super Bowl game alone. That may seem like a lot of money, but its a small droplet in one of those massive Gatorade coolers. The NFL now generates more than $20 billion in annual revenue and is on track to achieve the $25 billion revenue goal that Commissioner Roger Gooddell targeted by 2027. With so much money flying around, the leagues current crop of stars are also cashing in. Mahomes, the Chiefs quarterback, signed a 10-year, $450 million contract back in 2020, which means he earns an average annual salary of $45 million. Jalen Hurts, quarterback for the Eagles, signed a five-year, $255 million contract extension back in 2023, which sees him earning an even higher average-annual salary of $51 million. Thanks to their contracts, the quarterbacks could earn more than $2.5 million each week of the regular seasonand that doesnt include lucrative endorsement deals. Losers losing out less Of course, for every Mahomes and Hurts, there are dozens of players who dont share the limelight, nor those lucrative paychecks. The league minimum is currently $795,000, so the postseason paychecks represent a pretty considerable bonus for these players. While Super Bowl winners get even more perks, including the famously blingy ring, theres an interesting quirk to the Collective Bargaining Agreement: Super Bowl losers are actually earning a higher share of the winners paycheck as time goes on. When the Chiefs lost the 2021 Super Bowl, those players took home exactly 50% of the pay of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers players. By 2031, the losing team will earn about 67% of the winning teams payout. Turns out, even the losers get lucky sometimes.
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