Category: In the News

Now that the washing up’s done and the snacking detritus has been swept off the floor, it’s time to consider the real winners and losers of this year’s Super Bowl – the brands. (The Seattle Seahawks may have won the actual game, but it was far from an offensive juggernaut – you have to really like punts to have gotten something out of it.)

The creative strategies employed by advertisers, as well as the media plans they relied upon to multiply the effect of their $8 million dollar spots, offer hints about how advertisers aim to reach audiences throughout the rest of the year.

With mutli-million dollar price tags and a highly polarized cultural climate, brands found themselves walking a tight rope at this year’s Big Game. To avoid alienating consumers, brands intentionally avoided saying anything that might sound remotely political, preferring to stay in the safety zone.

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Last week, Google’s parent company Alphabet reported that 2025 revenue was an eye-popping $403 billion, making the last 123 months its highest-earning year – almost $114 billion in Q4 alone – with these sums representing a 15% and 12% respective annual increase.

But as dollar bills stacked up, so did the legal citations. All this came the same week the IAB hosted its flagship annual conference, where the growing chorus of adland voices willing to try a new means of measuring effectiveness – many cite this as the crux of Google’s near stranglehold on ad spend –  could be heard.

For example, state plaintiffs in Google’s search antitrust case filed a motion to challenge Judge Amit Mehta’s poorly received (among voices in the ad industry, anyway), just weeks after the European Union issued a preliminary ruling against Google’s ad tech, echoing a ruling in a separate U.S. courtroom in 2025.

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