During the Super Bowl, advertisers aim to leave a lasting impression with viewers. This year, some hoped to do it by grossing them out.

During the commercial breaks of this year’s game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks, potty humor abounded. Liquid I.V. ran a PSA-style national ad during the first quarter that encouraged viewers to gaze into the porcelain throne and evaluate the color of their urine. Just before halftime, William Shatner appeared as “bran ambassador” Will Shat in a streaming and regional spot for Raisin Bran, nodding to the scatological importance of fiber while toeing the line of acceptable profanity: “Will Shat on the car!” one character declares, incredulous.

The jokes didn’t stop there. In a regional ad that ran in the Philadelphia area, Garage Beer co-owner Jason Kelce repeatedly smears horse feces on his face in a not-so-subtle reference to Budweiser’s famous Clydesdales. (“These beers taste great, but it smells like—” he says as he sips on a beer, the audio cutting out the last word.) And in lieu of a traditional TV buy, Columbia Sportswear Company released what the company’s SVP and head of marketing, Matt Sutton (no relation), dubbed on LinkedIn “the Super Bowl’s sh*ttiest ad”: a beer brewed in partnership with the Portland, Oregon-based Breakside Brewery using bona fide bear poop that’s designed to give consumers “a taste of the outdoors.” The name of the beer, which was handed out at Super Bowl tailgates? Nature Calls.

Throughout the course of human history, gross-out jokes have served as a reliable way to get a big laugh among the adolescent set, and this year’s Super Bowl—or should we say, Toilet Bowl—brought that style of humor to an audience of millions. The sophomoric creative choices reflect brand pressures to land punchlines during a high-stakes advertising moment while also avoiding higher-risk messages that could potentially alienate audiences. (Often, the greatest short-term gamble of a bathroom joke is that a viewer wrinkles their nose with an “eww.”) And the humor and shock value is certainly bound to make an ad conversation fodder—even if it doesn’t necessarily win over consumers long-term.

“You wanna be talked about,” Ronnie Goodstein, associate professor of marketing at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, told Marketing Brew. “People will talk about the shit ads.”

Continue reading here.—KS

The 2026 Super Bowl came to an anticlimactic close less than 24 hours ago, but ESPN is already priming fans for next year’s game.

The Big Game is a big deal for ESPN: Next year will mark the first time the Disney-owned network will broadcast the Super Bowl, and it will also be simulcast on ABC as its first Super Bowl in more than a decade. So Disney is pulling out all the stops, including airing its first promotional spot for the game starting today.

The ad leverages a significant portion of Disney’s sizable IP library—more than 60 characters from the Muppets to Moana to Marvel—in an effort to hype the 2027 Super Bowl up to anyone and everyone, not just sports fans, Disney execs told Marketing Brew.

“This is arguably the biggest entertainment event in the world…and this would be the time to really do something different and big, and maybe break some of the rules of how IP sits together,” said Carrie Brzezinski-Hsu, SVP of ESPN Creative Studio and creative execution for Disney. “How do we make this an invitation and show kids and families, and anybody, that the characters that you love also love sports and love the Super Bowl?”

Read more here.—AM

Crossover Formula 1 and NFL fans, fasten your seatbelts.

The Cadillac F1 team, which is set to make its debut on the grid when the 2026 F1 season gets up and running in Australia in March, released its car livery this weekend on marketing’s biggest stage: the Super Bowl.

Standing up a brand-new F1 team is expensive, and so is a Super Bowl ad, but for Cadillac, which is already working to be known as the American team in the paddock, the team never really considered another option for the livery reveal, Cadillac F1 CMO Ahmed Iqbal told Marketing Brew.

“As we were positioning ourselves as America’s new home team, how and where do we actually start this story?” Iqbal said. “No better place to do it than the pinnacle moment of sports media entertainment in American culture, which is the Super Bowl. That really was the main focus—to find the right platform to do the story and to really plant our flag as America’s new team.”

In addition to being a uniquely American moment, the Super Bowl also provides Cadillac with the reach the team is looking for as it works to introduce itself to a wide range of potential fans, from F1 diehards to newcomers.

Continue reading here.—AM, JN

Executive moves across the industry.

• Disney named the head of its amusement park business, Josh D’Amaro, as CEO, succeeding longtime company head Bob Iger.
• Fandom tapped Jay Sullivan, a former exec at Groupon, Facebook, and Mozilla, as CEO.
• Uber promoted its VP of strategic finance, Balaji Krishnamurthy, to the role of CFO.
• Lionsgate hired Kathleen Grace to the role of chief AI officer, a new role at the studio.
• Ebiquity hired MediaLink exec David Muldoon to serve as global managing director of marketing transformation, a newly created role.