Super Bowl Ads as a Bubble Warning
The Super Bowl has something for everyone. For sports fans, there’s the game itself. For music fans, there’s the halftime show. And for speculative bubble fans, there’s the TV ads. This year, we saw 15 ads featuring AI-related services, including ads from both Anthropic and OpenAI.[1] This advertising wave is consistent with a brewing AI bubble.
Let’s look at two prior waves of ads. First, Super Bowl XXXIV (on January 30, 2000) featured between 14 and 19 internet-related ads, depending on how you count. It thus earned the nickname “the Dot-Com Bowl.” Advertisers included Pets.com with its sock puppet, as well as E*Trade with three different ads. Eleven days later, Pets.com had its IPO. The stock market subsequently peaked on March 10, 2000, and Pets.com shut down in November 2000.
Second, Super Bowl LVI (February 13, 2022) prominently featured crypto ads, and was similarly dubbed “the Crypto Bowl.” Crypto advertisements included the now infamous FTX ad featuring Larry David. Nine months after the Crypto Bowl, crypto prices had collapsed and FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was in handcuffs.
This year, some are calling Super Bowl LX “the AI Bowl.” [2] What are the implications? Well, not every wave of ads is meaningful. For example, Super Bowls LV and LVI featured multiple ads for hard seltzer, and yet there was no hard seltzer bubble in the stock market. Ad waves indicate bubbles when they reflect/encourage speculative buying by retail investors, either buying in general (e.g., E*Trade in 2000 and crypto in 2022) or for specific stocks including forthcoming IPOs (e.g., Pets.com in 2000). Super Bowl LX implies an incipient AI bubble because some advertisers are IPO candidates later this year.
For advertisers, a spot during the Super Bowl kills two birds with one stone: you advertise your product or service, and you raise investor interest for your shares. For companies that are already publicly traded, an ad on Super Bowl Sunday can raise your stock price on Monday, as shown by my colleague Vlad Zdorovtsov and his coauthors.[3]
If you want to boost your stock price, you could run a Super Bowl ad, or alternatively you could engage in aggressive accounting practices, or for maximum effect you could do both simultaneously. In 2000, MicroStrategy ran two Super Bowl commercials: “Stock Alert” (about trading stocks) and “Fraud” (about preventing credit card fraud).[4] Both proved prophetic. Two months later, MicroStrategy shareholders received the alert that it was restating its financial results, and its shares fell over 60% in a single day. The SEC subsequently charged MicroStrategy executives, including CEO Michael Saylor, with accounting fraud.[5] Twenty-six years later, Saylor and his firm (now called Strategy) continue to make news.
For companies that want to go public, Super Bowl ads can pave the way, as with Pets.com in 2000. But you have to act fast. Dot-Com Bowl advertisers included many obscure startups, such as OurBeginning.com, E-Stamp.com, and Epidemic.com (a company that was clearly 20 years ahead of its time). None of these firms subsequently had an IPO. While OurBeginning.com advertised “as a way to reach Wall Street in the hopes of going public later in the year,” after March 2000 the window of opportunity closed.[6]
I’d never heard of AI.com and Genspark, two of this year’s advertisers. AI.com’s founder is also a co-founder of Crypto.com, one of the Crypto Bowl advertisers in 2022. Crypto.com’s ad featured LeBron James and the slogan “Fortune favors the brave.” Unfortunately for crypto investors, in the period after February 2022, fortune actually favored the prudent.[7] Genspark’s ad featured Matthew Broderick and a reference to Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). This ad didn’t work for me, as I was reminded of Broderick’s role in WarGames (1983), where a rogue AI nearly triggers nuclear war.
On the surface, Super Bowl LX was a battle between the Patriots and the Seahawks. But on a different level, it was a battle between Anthropic and OpenAI. Here’s PitchBook:[8]
The two largest AI startups duking it out during America’s most-watched cultural event of the year signals a new phase in the battle for dominance: the fight for mindshare and legitimacy as both prepare for massive IPOs.
Once again, today’s stock market resembles 1999/2000. If the wave of AI ads at the Super Bowl is followed by a wave of AI IPOs later this year, watch out.
Endnotes
[1] “AI Took Over the Super Bowl, Accounting for 23% of Ads,” Adweek, February 8, 2026.
[2] For example, “Super Bowl LX is turning into AI's coming-out party,” MarketWatch, February 6, 2026.
[3] Fehle, Frank, Sergey Tsyplakov, and Vladimir Zdorovtsov. "Can companies influence investor behaviour through advertising? Super bowl commercials and stock returns." European Financial Management 11, no. 5 (2005): 625-647.
[4] References to this and other companies should not be interpreted as recommendations to buy or sell specific securities. Acadian and/or the author of this post may hold positions in one or more securities associated with these companies.
[5] “MicroStrategy Chairman Accused of Fraud by S.E.C.,” The New York Times, December 15, 2000.
[6] “OurBeginning.com- Angry Brides,” AdAge, January 16, 2016.
[7] As suggested in “Quick Take: Fortune Favors the… Boring?,” Acadian, February 2022.
[8] “The AI Super Bowl ad battle is a new phase in the competition to IPO first,” PitchBook, February 6, 2026.
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