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Prices for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl on NBC this year averaged $8 million. For the privilege of paying that, advertisers are required to spend an additional $8 million to buy ad time on other NBC sports broadcasts and the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. With that much money invested (all before any is spent on actually creating a Super Bowl campaign) brands need to ensure they get your attention. This year, Rocket Mortgage and Redfin are aiming to do that by combining three things that will produce a large Venn diagram of interest: Lady Gaga singing Mr. Rogers’s “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”; a heartwarming commercial airing during the game; and, most crucially, giving viewers the chance to win a million-dollar house. [Photo: Rocket Cos.] Rocket Cos. CMO Jonathan Mildenhall says any successful Super Bowl campaign needs to have three different stages. The only way to win at the Super Bowl is to win a disproportionate share of conversation pregame, as well as during game, and, increasingly, the progressive brands are talking about postgame conversation, Mildenhall says. For us the pregame was Lady Gaga behind the scenes, then during the game there is the spot, and we’re announcing the Great American home search for people to participate in over the days after the game. So Mildenhall is playing Super Bowl chess, not checkers. [Photo: Rocket Cos.] Great American Home Search On February 4, Redfin (acquired by Rocket last year) announced the contest, calling it a “never-been-done-before scavenger hunt” and inviting people to download or update the Redfin app to participate. The search begins February 8 at 8 p.m. ET, immediately after Rocket and Redfins Super Bowl spot airs. Redfin will then release six app-exclusive clues over the next 48 hours for players to use Redfins search tools and filters to find the million-dollar home, which actually appears directly in the commercial. The first eligible player to solve all six clues and identify the home wins the house. It’s a double-play attempt both to get people’s attention and immediately boost Redfin’s competitive muscle amid category leaders Zillow and Realtor.com. “Turning up and just speaking to America using celebrities, bad jokes, and flashing a logo quickly becomes invisible, so we have to do a massive activation,” Mildenhall says. “Calling this activation the Great American Home Search is a deliberate attempt to create a strategic lockout from the biggest competitors because I want people to spontaneously associate Redfin and home search.” [Photo: Rocket Cos.] Neighborhood watch The audience-participation aspect of Rockets strategy is just one lever the company is pulling for the Super Bowl. The spot itself is another. Mildenhall says the creative behind the ad was inspired by the stark reality of how disconnected most of us are from the people we live next door to. According to a March 2025 Pew Research Study, only about 26% of Americans know most of their neighbors. And the percentage of people who know and trust their neighbors has decreased 8% since 2015. This is part of the reason why Rocket enlisted Lady Gaga to reinterpret the Fred Rogers classic Wont You Be My Neighbor? After teasing fans with a behind-the-scenes video of Gagas recording session a week before the game, the actual Super Bowl ad shows the emotional roller coaster of moving and the evolving dynamics of neighborhoods through the eyes of two teenage girls. Mildenhall says the goal is to spark a more culturally significant conversation with America about being better neighbors and being a better neighbor as a civic responsibility. Americans ache for something and we see it in the stats. People are lonelier than ever before and need excuses and reasons to connect, Mildenhall says. People are struggling to find inspiration to connect with their neighbors. And we are going to be culturally significant brands because we’re going to tap into the cultural tension that can help lift up more Americans than any other tension. And this story is pressing into the loneliness that people feel in their own neighborhoods. For most brands, having the Great American Home Search would be enough. But Rocket and Redfin have added the layer of a tearjerker spot scored by Lady Gaga. The combination of classic Super Bowl ad storytelling with audience participation to drive app downloads puts this on the short list for best all-around big game spot. [Photo: Rocket Cos.] Setting the tone Last year, Rockets Super Bowl ad revolved around the dream of home ownership. According to a variety of recent studies, anywhere between 85% and 94% of Americans believe owning a home is good for the country and a fundamental stepping stone to the American dream. The ad Own the Dream was set to John Denvers classic Country Roads. The twist was that coming out of the commercial break, the brand had arranged for the song to be played in the stadium, so as the ad ended, viewers came back to the game with the crowd singing the same song in real time. It was viewed nearly 250 million times on social media, and brand awareness has gone from 23% to 37%, according to the company. Mildenhall says when he met with Lady Gaga for this years ad, she was very respectful of the original song but he wanted it to be something different. His message was, This cannot be a lullaby to America, it has to be a rallying cry to America. He adds that she was up to that, went into the studio, and it’s amazing. For years, Rocket went for comedy in its Super Bowl spots, with big laughs from the likes of Jason Momoa (2020), Tracy Morgan (2021), and Anna Kendrick (2022). But Mildenhall says that while both the Morgan and Kendrick ads won the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter, it wasnt the right fit for the brand. Every time that somebody gets their mortgage, refinances their home, or gets out of bad credit card debt, were helping people get into college, or buy the house, and facilitating the American dream, he says. But our past approach would kind of cheapen that because we were getting celebrities doing jokes, and there’s nothing really funny about what we do. The short long game Most Super Bowl ads are what marketers call top-of-funnel work, basically vibes-based brand building for the longer term. But Mildenhall says marketers are under incredible scrutiny from their board and shareholders about every dollar, and its tough to show short-term value in longer-term brand marketing. A creatively executed contest is a shortcut to short-term results, even in the Super Bowl. DoorDash pioneered this concept with DoorDash All the Ads in 2024, getting more than 8 million contest submissions and 11 billion impressions. And its in-game ad was just a promo code. Rocket is combining that with Lady Gaga singing Mr. Rogers over a heartwarming story about an emotional part of the American dream. The spot itself is a great piece of brand marketing, but its also got a clue for the contest embedded in it, which will encourage contestants to watch it over and over. Meanwhile, the contest is driving downloads of the Redfin app, which will undoubtedly satisfy short-term justification of the big game investment. We’re going to ensure that we’ve got eyeballs on the spot looking for the home, but it’s only after it airs that the first of six clues are given, and the remaining six clues are given over a 48-hour period to ensure that Rocket and Redfin are in the postgame conversation, Mildenhall says. So the new strategy that I would implore all marketers to be thinking about is you’ve got three stages of Super Bowl investment and one of those stages has to be dominated by your audience participation. If you win that house, though, just remember to learn your neighbors names.
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E-Commerce
For totally logical reasons, this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy is bucking the trend of a single host city and splitting its sporting events between two main locations, Milan and Cortina. Milan, the second most populous city in Italy, is the urban setting for indoor events like ice hockey and ice skating. Cortina, a ski resort town 250 miles away, provides most of the snowand hill-based venues for quintessential Winter Olympic sports like alpine skiing and the bobsled. But the two separate locations posed a problem for one of the key parts of the Olympics: the opening ceremony. How could there be one grand show when the sporting action was split in half and separated by hundreds of miles? The solution was to put on the show simultaneously in both places. When the opening ceremony is televised around the world on February 6, its pomp, performances, and athlete parades will be broadcast from both Milan and Cortina, with segments from each location woven together into one show. Creative director and executive producer Marco Balich, a veteran of 16 Olympic ceremonies, says the decision to include both locations became a kind of guiding concept for the ceremony itself. Marco Balich (left) with Claudio Coviello and Antonella Albano (right) – Principal Dancers of Teatro la Scala [Photo: International Olympic Committee] Cortina, he says, is “pure mountains,” while Milan is the opposite, “a total industrial, design- and fashion-driven city.” “The narrative that we figured was going to be interesting was the relationship between a location in a city and a mountain, creating a metaphor between man and nature,” he says. [Image: International Olympic Committee] The dichotomy led to the theme of the show, Armonia, or Harmony. “The message that we humbly propose to the world would be to take the metaphor of man and nature and underline that we need to create dialogue between those two elements,” Balich says. Balich and his firm Balich Wonder Studio used this concept to guide the design of everything from the rainbow of costumes dancers will wear to the spiraling stage for the Milan segment of the ceremony. Caterina Botticelli, Costumes Manager [Photo: International Olympic Committee] Balich, who is Italian, also worked on the last Olympics held in Italy, the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, and he says that opening ceremony played heavily on Italian history. This year’s version is much more driven by the impact of Italy on the world, and will include references to Italian inventors, Italian design, and Italian fashion. A special segment of the show will honor the late fashion designer Giorgio Armani. Elements of the ceremony will also feature the mountain areas Valtellina and Val di Fiemme, where other outdoor events will take place. All athletes competing in this year’s Olympics will be able to participate in the ceremony. [Photo: International Olympic Committee] Despite the technical challenges of filming the 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in multiple locations, Balich says the overall production is intended to be very analog and very human. “The images that I remember of the Olympics are always human driven, whether it was Muhammad Ali lighting the cauldron in Atlanta or the drumming in Beijing 2008,” he says.
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E-Commerce
Forget Donald Trump. A new analysis suggests the U.S. publics sharp lurch into polarization began in 2008, years before his first presidential campaign. Researchers at the University of Cambridges Political Psychology Lab tracked shifts in Americans views across nearly four decades and found that divisions were broadly stable through the 1990s and early 2000s, before rising steadily from 2008 onward. Using more than 35,000 responses from the American National Election Studies between 1988 and 2024, they estimate that issue polarization has increased 64% since the late 1980s, with almost all of that change occurring after 2008. The research uses a machine-learning approach to move beyond party labels and better understand what actually drives Americans political views. Instead of relying on whether respondents identify as Republican or Democrat, the team grouped people based on patterns in what they believe across a range of issues, from abortion and traditional family values to race, inequality, and health insurance. That distinction matters because in many countries politically opposite parties do not exist, says David Young, a psychology researcher at the University of Cambridge, U.K., and one of the studys authors. You might even want to study countries where there are no parties, like Saudi Arabia, he says. The paper challenges the idea that polarization is solely a Trump-era phenomenon. It points to 2008 as the major turning point, a year that also included the financial crisis, Barack Obamas election, and the widespread adoption of the iPhone-era internet. Our ability to nail down when it starts is slightly divided by the fact that we only have data points every four years, Young says. Still, we know that this increase starts from our 2008 data point, he adds. Thats our best guess at the starting point. The researchers argue that the widening gap is driven less by the right drifting further right and more by the left moving rapidly in a progressive direction. Based on the issues surveyed, the left cluster became 31.5% more socially liberal by 2024 compared with 1988, while the right cluster shifted only 2.8% more conservative. Its not necessarily that left-wingers and right-wingers have become more extreme, Young says. Its more that theyve become more kind of consolidated.
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E-Commerce
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