Snacks, sports betting, and beer: The industries poised to dominate this year's Super Bowl

There’s always a standout during the Super Bowl—and no, we’re not talking about the players.

In 2022, the Super Bowl was so full of ads from cryptocurrency brands that it was unofficially dubbed the Crypto Bowl. Last year, sportsbooks were among the most prevalent Super Bowl advertisers. This year, don’t be surprised if you find yourself craving a little treat during the Big Game.

“Snacks are back, from the first-time advertisers to the seasoned vets,” Rick Suter, a senior content strategist at Gannett and editor of USA Today’s Ad Meter, told Marketing Brew. “You’re going to have the Molson Coors rumblings, obviously, a lot of people are looking at Budweiser and Bud Light as well, but none of that has really held a candle to the amount of snack brands…These brands are coming out swinging.”

In addition to snacks and beer, experts are eyeing a few other industries that seem poised to flood the Super Bowl ad zone this year—as well as others that could be ceding some of their usual territory.

Snack attack: Hungry yet? There are at least eight snack and dessert brands lined up for the game this year, including returning brands Pringles, Doritos, Oreo, Reese’s, and M&M’s, as well as first-time Super Bowl advertisers like Drumstick, Nerds, and Lindt.

To explain the Super Bowl snack load, Michelle Deignan, VP of Oreo US, pointed to the “lipstick effect,” the theory that consumers continue to spend on less expensive products like lipstick and treats during times of economic uncertainty.

“Snacking brands get a benefit when some of the economic pressures exist more broadly,” she said.

Regardless of economic factors, “the Super Bowl is one of the biggest snacking days of the year,” Chris Bellinger, CCO of PepsiCo Foods US, told Marketing Brew via email.

Brands like Doritos are Super Bowl regulars, and in the runup to this year’s game, PepsiCo promoted Lay’s, Cheetos, and Tostitos in a “Taste of Super Bowl” campaign that started airing during Super Wild Card Weekend, according to Bellinger.

“NFL viewership is climbing and only increasing in cultural relevance, so we want to make sure we meet our consumers where they’re at and play a role in their game-day experiences,” he said.

Bevvys: Super Bowl viewers might also be inclined to reach for a cold beverage to wash down all those snacks, and since this will be the second year without Anheuser-Busch InBev as the exclusive alcohol advertiser in the Super Bowl, “it’ll be interesting to see how the other brands continue to emerge as being memorable during the Super Bowl,” Kerry Benson, creative solutions lead at Kantar, told us.

Despite the end of its exclusivity, AB InBev is still a major force in the Super Bowl, running ads for Budweiser, Bud Light, and Michelob Ultra. But it’ll face some competition from Molson Coors’s Coors Light.

Place your bets: Unlike crypto commercials after 2022, sports betting ads don’t seem to be disappearing anytime soon. Benson predicted betting platforms will “continue to be big,” perhaps in part because the game is being held in Las Vegas, Suter said.

BetMGM and FanDuel have both confirmed they’ll be advertising during the game. Those two brands, along with PrizePicks and DraftKings, together spent about $620 million advertising last year, largely on TV, according to ad intelligence platform MediaRadar. (Still, BetMGM, FanDuel, and DraftKings each reduced their ad spend from 2022 to 2023, MediaRadar found.)

Autopilot: There is one industry that appears to have a smaller presence at the Super Bowl than usual. While several automakers, including BMW, Kia, Toyota, and Volkswagen, are running Super Bowl spots, auto ads have somewhat “died off” in recent years, Suter said.

There were a handful of electric-vehicle ads last year, Benson noted, but he said the industry seems to be lagging behind its usual Super Bowl presence. It’s possible that those EV ads a year ago “just didn’t resonate” with the audience, Suter said.