While many marketers and creatives still crave the prestige of the traditional 30-second broadcast spot, the ad industry has been waking up to the reality that brands can use social to leverage Super Bowl hype for huge impact without the huge media buy. Super Bowl LX provided lots of proof of that.
Rather than competing for a moment of passive viewing, these brands proved social media has become a platform for interactive, community-driven, and creator-led activations that reach audiences directly where they spend their time.
Read about two such campaigns here and here.
“TV has become a pointer, not the engine,” said Ofer Familier, CEO and co-founder of Dig. “The engine is a social system: creators as the reach layer, communities as the distribution layer, and interactive mechanics that turn viewers into participants. Dig data shows the winners were not chasing impressions. They were engineering virality through UGC loops, remixing, and active engagement that lasts weeks after Game Day.”
Social-only campaigns: winning without a broadcast spot:
These campaigns demonstrate that social-first, interactive, and community-focused campaigns can drive visibility, engagement, and even virality without a single TV placement.
- Hyundai’s “Epic Picks” skipped TV entirely. Fans made game predictions on social to unlock donations to pediatric cancer research, earning social praise for authenticity and contributing $1 million to Hyundai Hope on Wheels.
- DoorDash’s “The Big Beef” targeted Gen Z’s second-screen behaviour with a phone-first activation featuring 50 Cent teaching fans “the art of trash talk.” The campaign lived almost entirely on social media, earning high engagement over the weekend.
- eBay’s “End Zone Clubhouse” debuted as a physical activation in the Bay Area, doubled as a TikTok/Instagram livestream studio, turning Super Bowl LX into a shoppable social event.
- Abercrombie & Fitch hosted a private fashion show and gifted custom bomber jackets to players, flooding influencer feeds with style-led content.
- Doritos used community-driven UGC, encouraging fans to create commercials and jingles, amplifying content organically across TikTok. While the campaign generated thousands of posts and millions of views, it functioned entirely outside of broadcast media.
Hybrid social + TV campaigns: TV as a pointer, social as the engine
Other Super Bowl campaigns did run television commercials but relied on social as the primary driver of reach and engagement. Dig’s analysis of 39,000 posts across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook highlights several examples:
These campaigns illustrate a key shift: maximum impact does not come from TV alone no longer drives campaigns — social, creators, community and interactivity are powerful amplifiers. Even with broadcast exposure, the social acts as the engine of engagement, extending the narrative across weeks and turning audiences into contributors.
- Salesforce + MrBeast – $1M digital puzzle: TV pointed viewers to the interactive puzzle on TikTok, generating 10.2M views with a 10.58% engagement rate.
- Uber Eats – “Build Your Own Ad”: Broadcast spots featuring Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper directed audiences to personalised ad experiences, yielding nearly 23M views and 92,908 shares on Instagram.
- Fanatics + Kendall Jenner: TV introduced the campaign, but the social-first narrative around pop-culture memes reached 71.2M views with a 5.07% engagement rate.
- Pringles – Sabrina Carpenter and fan challenges: Social amplification of creator-led challenges generated strong participation (26M views, 5.56% ER), even as TV spots aired alongside.
Source: Campaign Canada
