CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS IN SUPER BOWL ADVERTISING DURING THE PERIOD 2021–2025

The Super Bowl is the final game of the American football season, attended live by tens of thousands of fans every year, and is a mega sports event that is arguably similarly as important as the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games. Moreover, this event is very significant in terms of the worldwide television audience and boasts the most expensive 30-second ad slots in the advertising realm. While doing an academic literature review about Super Bowl commercials, we noticed that many studies emphasize that celebrity endorsement has a positive impact on ad likeability and therefore, consumers' positive attitude towards the brand. This prompted us to conduct our own research to investigate how many advertisers at the Super Bowl use a celebrity endorsement strategy to differentiate themselves and get the attention of the target audience. The first step of our research involved an in-depth review of all Super Bowl-related media assets from the last five years (found in a database on the site Ads of The World) with the aim of evaluating the celebrity presence. A subsequent statistical analysis helped us calculate the share of ads containing celebrity endorsers in the researched time period (2021-2025). Our results showed that every year, more than half of the Super Bowl ads had some form of celebrity presence, with the highest share being 63.08% in 2024. In the second phase of the research, we sorted all identified celebrities by their vocation and the figures showed that companies most commonly chose athletes, actors, and musicians as their endorsers. These findings reaffirmed that celebrity endorsement is an important strategic element in advertising, thereby opening avenues for future research which could go in three directions: calculating the prevalence of celebrity endorsers by product category; exploring which celebrity vocations consumers see as most credible and influential; and examining how traditional celebrities compare with emerging influencers made famous through digital media.