The NFL season hasn’t even started, and the Super Bowl is already sold out.
Disney has reportedly sold all of its commercial inventory for Super Bowl LXI, more than six months before kickoff. According to Front Office Sports, 58 brands across 34 categories have secured inventory, including nine first-time Super Bowl advertisers. Asking prices reached as high as $10 million for 30 seconds, with many spots reportedly selling in the $8 million to $9 million range.
On the surface, this is a story about demand. Advertisers want live sports. They want scale. And they are willing to pay a premium to be part of the biggest moments on the calendar.
But there is another story here.
The Super Bowl may happen on one Sunday in February, but Super Bowl advertising doesn’t begin or end when the ball is kicked. In many ways, it has already started.
Earlier this year, we wrote about how live events aren’t what they used to be, and the Super Bowl proves it.
Super Bowl LX wasn’t confined to one broadcast. It unfolded across NBC and Peacock, while the conversation extended into social, creator content and other digital environments. At the same time, advertisers were navigating the Winter Olympics and other live sports programming competing for consumer attention.
That fragmentation changes the way we think about major sporting events. A Super Bowl campaign is no longer simply a 30-second spot. It’s the campaign that starts during the regular season. It’s the sponsorship. It’s the pre-game activation. It’s the streaming creative. It’s the social extension. It’s the commercial that airs during the game. And increasingly, it’s how all of those pieces connect to tell one story.
We saw exactly that during Super Bowl LX. Uber Eats, for example, didn’t wait until February to start telling its story. Its "Football Is Just Selling Food" campaign developed throughout the NFL season before reaching its biggest audience around the Super Bowl. The game became the climax of the campaign, rather than the beginning of it.
That distinction matters, because if we only measure the Super Bowl, we miss the strategy that got brands there.
MediaRadar’s 2026 Super Bowl Advertising Snapshot gives us a sense of just how much investment is concentrated around the game itself. MediaRadar measured $720 million in linear ad spend across 65 advertisers, compared with $189 million in streaming ad spend across 70 advertisers. The game itself averaged approximately $10 million in ad spend per occurrence.
But who spent that money is just as interesting as how much was spent.
Software and AI became one of the defining advertising stories of Super Bowl LX. The category reached $116 million in spend, a 176% increase from the prior year, with seven new advertisers entering the category. OpenAI, Google, Amazon and GenSpark each invested an estimated $16 million, while Intuit invested $12 million. Claude, Base44, Wix Harmony, AI.com and Microsoft were also among the category’s advertisers.
Other categories moved in the opposite direction. Beer and ale spend declined 29%, with Coors and Stella Artois sitting out the 2026 game. And several major advertisers from the previous Super Bowl, including Jeep, Pfizer, MSC and Ram, did not return.
See the complete Super Bowl LX Snapshot
Those movements are important signals. But imagine if we could zoom out.
Did those brands really stop investing in football, or did their dollars move somewhere else? Was a brand present at both the Super Bowl and the Olympics? Was it an NFL sponsor, an advertiser, or both? Did an advertiser that sat out the Super Bowl spend heavily throughout the NFL season? Did a brand begin increasing investment in September before making its first Super Bowl appearance in February? And how did its creative and messaging evolve as the season progressed?
Those are very different questions. And they require a different way of looking at sports advertising.
At MediaRadar, we’ve developed a Sports Intelligence framework that we’re calling Total Event Investment.
The premise is simple: the biggest moments in sports shouldn’t be measured as isolated events. We want to understand the entire investment surrounding them.
For the NFL, that means following advertiser activity throughout the regular season and into the playoffs before ultimately reaching the Super Bowl. It also means looking beyond traditional advertising to understand the sponsorship investments brands make with teams, leagues and other sports properties.
Instead of asking only who advertised in the Super Bowl, we can begin asking who invested in the NFL season. When did they enter? Were they an official sponsor, an advertiser, or both? How did their investment change as the season progressed? Which platforms did they use? What creative stories did they tell? And what happened to those stories as the stakes got bigger?
That creates a much richer picture of the sports ecosystem. A brand’s presence isn’t defined by a single commercial or sponsorship. It’s the combination of where it invests, the partnerships it builds and the stories it tells over time. The Super Bowl becomes the biggest moment in the story, but not the whole story.
Request demo of MediaRadar Sports Intelligence
MediaRadar Sports Intelligence provides a connected view into advertiser, category, spend, sponsorship and creative activity across major sports leagues.
We saw another version of this during the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
A tournament like the World Cup naturally creates a series of connected advertising moments rather than one isolated championship game. Brands can enter during the group stage. Creative can change as teams advance. Investment builds around marquee matches. Messaging responds to the cultural conversation. Eventually, everything culminates in the final.
That gives us the ability to look beyond who advertised during a single match and begin understanding how brands use the tournament as a whole. Which advertisers showed up early? Who increased their investment as the tournament progressed? Which brands held official sponsorships, and how did they extend those partnerships through paid media? What creative did they use? Which brands found ways to align themselves with the biggest moments without an official sponsorship?
The World Cup gives us a tournament. The NFL gives us something even longer: a narrative that can unfold for months.
That is where Total Event Investment becomes particularly powerful. It allows us to think about sports not simply as a collection of broadcasts, but as a series of connected moments where media investment, sponsorship and storytelling evolve over time.
There’s another important side to a sold-out Super Bowl. The official inventory may be gone, but the opportunity around the Super Bowl isn’t. Brands don’t need an $8 million or $10 million commercial to participate in the conversation surrounding the biggest sporting event of the year. In fact, when premium inventory becomes this scarce, what happens outside the official broadcast becomes even more interesting.
This is where ambush marketing comes into play. Traditionally, ambush marketing has meant finding ways to associate a brand with a major event without paying for official sponsorship rights. But in today’s fragmented media environment, the opportunity is much broader. While official sponsors invest for the right to build an explicit association with a league, team or event, other brands can still build experiences around the game, activate through creators and social media, advertise against adjacent programming, show up in the host city, or tap into the cultural conversations and fan behaviors surrounding the event.
The official Super Bowl inventory may be sold out, and the official spots may be spoken for, but the playing field around the moment is wide open.
That puts a greater premium on creative thinking and strategy. The question isn’t simply, "Did you buy the Super Bowl?" or even, "Did your logo show up on the live stream?" It’s whether you earned a place in the Super Bowl conversation. And for many brands, that work starts long before February.
The strongest brands don’t necessarily introduce themselves on Super Bowl Sunday. They can spend the entire NFL season building an identity with football audiences. Week after week, brands have opportunities to establish storylines with players and characters, humor, messaging, products and creative that consumers begin to recognize. The biggest moments then become an opportunity to bring that identity to life at a completely different scale.
Think about the difference between encountering a brand for the first time during the Super Bowl and seeing the culmination of a story you’ve been watching all season. That is what makes the season itself so valuable.
It’s also why looking at the entire NFL season, rather than only Super Bowl Sunday, becomes so important. With Total Event Investment, MediaRadar can begin connecting those dots: who is investing throughout the season, which brands hold sponsorships, how much they’re spending, where they’re showing up and what stories they’re telling. Then, as the playoffs begin and the Super Bowl approaches, we can see which brands accelerate their investment, which evolve their creative, which enter the conversation for the first time and which find ways to participate without ever buying an official Super Bowl spot.
That last group becomes particularly interesting when the game sells out six months early. A brand that didn’t secure an in-game commercial still has months of opportunity ahead of it. NFL broadcasts, streaming, sponsorships, adjacent programming, social, creators, experiential activations and the host city itself all offer ways to build relevance. For media sellers, that creates opportunity. For brands and agencies, it creates a reason to understand what competitors are doing before the biggest moment arrives.
Disney can sell every commercial in the Super Bowl, but it can’t sell out the conversation around it. Between now and kickoff, brands will spend months competing for attention across NFL broadcasts, streaming, sponsorships, social media, experiences and culture. Some will be official sponsors. Some will have a spot in the game. Some will have both. And some of the smartest marketers may have neither.
Because in modern sports marketing, the biggest game isn’t the whole story. It’s where the story comes together.
Want to Know More?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Karisa Schroeder
Karisa Schroeder is the Director of Product Marketing at MediaRadar, where she leads go-to-market strategies to launch and scale new products and solutions. With expertise in marketing intelligence, data marketplaces, DaaS, and AI-powered insights, she helps brands and agencies deliver connected customer experiences, focusing on creative, competitive, and sports advertising intelligence to drive measurable growth.