Sunday’s Big Game is traditionally a playground for consumer brands, with everything from big celebrities to louder-than-life stunts. But beneath all the flash, something more interesting took shape this year: B2B and enterprise brands claiming space on football’s biggest stage.
While B2B companies still make up a small overall percentage of the big game ad spots, their presence is growing, driven largely by AI, tech, and platform companies targeting a broad, mainstream audience. These brands aren’t trying to explain complex products in 30 seconds. Instead, the most successful campaigns leaned into emotion, storytelling, and cultural relevance, proving that even enterprise solutions can resonate at a human level.
This year’s big game reinforced a key truth: When B2B brands show up like entertainers instead of educators, they earn attention, curiosity, and long-term brand lift.
Some notable spots to watch:
- Squarespace: Squarespace returned to football’s biggest night for the 12th year in a row with a cinematic spot starring Emma Stone in her first-ever Big Game appearance. The noir-inspired film turned the unglamorous challenge of domain ownership into an emotional, surreal story about control and identity.
Rather than explaining features, the ad leaned into obsession, showing how something as simple as a domain name can matter deeply. It’s a reminder that craft, tone, and storytelling can outperform noise, even for B2B-adjacent brands.
- Claude (Anthropic): Anthropic used its moment to introduce Claude, its AI assistant, without celebrities or heavy technical language. The spot positioned AI as helpful, approachable, and rooted in real-life use cases, making an enterprise product feel accessible to a mass audience.
With a subtle wink at competitors, the ad struck a confident, self-aware tone, proving that clarity and relatability can carry just as much impact as star power in emerging tech categories.
- Ramp: Ramp leaned into mainstream familiarity with a spot starring The Office’s Brian Baumgartner, back in an office environment that instantly felt recognizable.
The ad visualized Ramp as a “force multiplier,” with Baumgartner multiplying across the workplace as the software cleared clutter and returned teams their most valuable asset: time. By pairing notable talent in an authentic creative premise, Ramp made a complex finance platform feel relevant, understandable, and human.
- Coinbase: Coinbase continued its run of minimalist, high-impact advertising with a lo-fi, karaoke-style commercial designed as the “world’s biggest singalong.” Featuring lyrics from the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”, the spot tapped into shared nostalgia, made even more timely with the band’s current residency at The Sphere.
Styled as if made on an ’80s computer, it reinforced a strategy that favors bold simplicity over explanation, driving home the message that crypto isn’t just for techies, it's for anyone who knows the lyrics. It also created a communal moment and pulled viewers’ attention away from their phones.
- Rippling: The cloud-based workforce management platform made its first-ever appearance starring comedian Tim Robinson, debuting its new brand campaign, Rule Your Business. The ad followed a would-be corporate mastermind whose plans for world domination unravel due to everyday operational failures like onboarding employees, and managing payroll and benefits. It showed how bad software can sabotage even the boldest ambitions.
The choice to launch an ad spot at a moment like this marked a deliberate shift from performance marketing to mass awareness. Football’s biggest stage gave the company an opportunity to introduce its value proposition to a broader audience of business leaders and set the tone for a larger, multi-spot campaign rolling out throughout the year.
Looking Ahead
The B2B brands that take advantage of traditional consumer moments like the Big Game can make a big impact. While costly (this years’ ads running anywhere from $8-$10 million for 60 seconds), these spots work best as part of a full-funnel marketing strategy, building brand awareness and long-term consideration. By prioritizing entertainment over explanation, B2B ads can engage viewers emotionally, strengthen brand recognition, and give complex products a chance to win hearts and minds on one of the year’s most-watched media stages.
See you next year! 🏈