Winning Big on Game Day: A Webinar on Super Bowl Ad Performance

By Mia Noble

February 13, 2025

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What are four best practices for developing a high-impact Super Bowl ad that excels in both Engagement and Influence?

Tapping into Sentient’s expansive historical database, AI delivered valuable insight into this question. On Tuesday, February 11th, Dr. Aaron Reid shared these findings with attendees of our annual Big Game webinar. Connecting 2025 spots to the tactics prescribed by AI, Reid evaluated ad performance—highlighting successes, shortcomings, and overall scores.

Before diving into the results, Reid first previewed the ad trends and themes present on game day. He then shifted the discussion to focus on the future of AI: training with raw human emotion. This introduction set the stage for our AI-powered approach to ad testing.

AI is only going to be able to produce output from data that it has been trained on, and what better data can there be to train than real human data? So what we’re introducing here today, under the title of automated behavioral science, is what we believe is the future of the most valuable training data for AI. And that is real, raw human emotion data—quatitative measures of human emotion.

After an explanation of Sentient’s approach, Dr. Reid analyzed key advertisements from Super Bowl LIX—showcasing the power of our Emotion AI in detecting viewers’ moment by moment emotional responses.

The session concluded with a preview of our next co-hosted webinar and a brief Q&A segment. Viewers left with actionable takeaways for ad optimization and with an understanding of game day winners and losers. Watch the full session below to review which creative tactics brands applied and learn how some of the most popular ads ranked.