Who Really Won Super Bowl LX? We Tracked Top Brands to Find Out

PeakMetrics analyzed hundreds of thousands of social and news mentions across six advertising categories during Super Bowl LX week. Here's what the data says about which brands broke through — and which ones fell flat.

Super Bowl ads cost upward of $7 million for 30 seconds of airtime. But the real question isn't who showed up; it's who actually won the conversation.

We tracked brand mentions across Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and news/web sources during Super Bowl LX week, covering six categories: alcohol, snacks, AI, cars, sports betting, and non-alcoholic beverages. We measured volume, Super Bowl campaign penetration, sentiment, engagement, reach, and bot activity to build a full picture of how each brand performed — not just on game day, but in the day of reaction and analysis that followed.

The results challenged some assumptions. The biggest spenders didn't always win the most hearts. The loudest brands weren't always the most authentic. And some of the most talked-about brands didn't even run an ad.

Here are the highlights.

Highest Super Bowl Campaign Penetration: Budweiser (Alcohol) — 70.6% of all mentions were Super Bowl-specific, the highest of any brand across every category analyzed. The Clydesdales and patriotic creative made the Super Bowl essentially Budweiser's entire conversation.

Best Super Bowl Favorability: Lay's (Snacks) — 65.2% positive sentiment in Super Bowl-specific mentions with a 34.4 pos/neg ratio, the highest favorability score recorded across all categories. Driven by strong Ad Meter performance (runner-up) and broad audience appeal.

Best Challenger Performance: Claude/Anthropic (AI) — generated virtually identical Super Bowl-specific buzz to ChatGPT despite having less than half the total volume. The "ad-free" counter-narrative against OpenAI's ad announcement produced direct comparison posts and coverage across CNBC, CNN, Fortune, and Fox News.

Highest Engagement Per Post: Budweiser (Alcohol) — 2,556 average retweets per post, an order of magnitude above every other brand in any category. (Worth noting: 21.5% bot rate inflates this, but organic engagement was still dominant.)

Most Talked-About Absence: Doritos (Snacks) — achieved 31.0% Super Bowl penetration without airing a commercial, fueled entirely by fan disappointment. Shows that established Super Bowl advertisers carry audience expectations — not showing up generates its own (mostly negative) conversation.

Biggest Polarizer: Cadillac (Cars) — the F1 car reveal drove 19.0% Super Bowl penetration (second only to Budweiser across all categories) but was the only auto brand with negative-leaning Super Bowl sentiment (0.87 ratio), compounded by the Michael Bay lawsuit.

Highest Per-Post Reach: Fanatics (Sports Betting) — 39.6M average reach per post, driven by the Kendall Jenner campaign generating pickup on entertainment and news platforms. But also the most polarizing in its category (0.72 Super Bowl pos/neg ratio).

First AI Super Bowl: Seven AI companies ran spots (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Amazon, Genspark, Base44) — the most concentrated AI ad presence in Super Bowl history.

Get the Full Report

Our complete Super Bowl LX analysis includes detailed breakdowns across all six categories — volume and share of voice data, sentiment analysis, bot activity assessments, reach and engagement metrics, narrative trend analysis, and category-by-category winner rankings.