Big Pharma tackles Super Bowl advertising

No one quite knows how to glitz and glam like an advertiser looking to make a splash during the Super Bowl commercial breaks.

This year, Big Pharma wanted in on the action.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a pharmaceutical company has run a Super Bowl ad (see last year’s controversial Hims & Hers ad that lawmakers and health experts urged the FDA to pull).

But 2026 is definitely setting itself up to be the year of the GLP-1 if Sunday’s game is any indication of trends to come: Eli Lilly landed a pregame slot while Novo Nordisk went for a pricey (read: roughly $24 million) in-game spot alongside telehealths Ro, which once again featured GLP-1 brand ambassador Serena Williams, and Hims & Hers. Drugmakers Novartis and Boehringer Ingelheim also ran ads unrelated to GLP-1s.

Is it paying off? The big question is whether this strategy of pushing more TV ads is actually working out for pharma companies.

According to data from advertising tech company Verve, both Novo and Hims saw the biggest jumps in web search counts on game day alone compared to the month prior at 11.4x and 4.7x growth, respectively. TV data and analytics company EDO ranked Super Bowl commercials based on how much consumers engaged with them following its airing, with Wegovy being the only pharma company to crack the top 10 with an engagement score of 374 (which, based on EDO’s scoring, means it had 374% as much engagement as the median Super Bowl commercial). Hims landed in the top 20 with a score of 225.

EDO also found that overall during this year’s NFL season, pharma ads appeared to be more effective compared to last year’s season. For instance, ads for Lilly’s GLP-1 Zepbound were 519% more effective than average pharma ads at driving potential consumer engagement, with Ro close behind at 246%.

But according to James Ramelli, partner at digital media agency Fyllo, pharma ads’ “‘likeability’ still lagged typical Super Bowl norms.”

While he expects the momentum around TV advertising to continue, he predicts “brands that pair the big-stage moment with measurable, privacy-safe follow-through will keep winning while brands that rely on spectacle alone will see diminishing returns.”

Regulations loom. But in the background is the ongoing discussion of how to regulate pharma advertisements. Novo received a letter from the FDA on Feb. 5 stating a recent Wegovy pill ad has “false or misleading” claims. Notably, this was not the spot that ran during the Super Bowl, CNBC reported.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other agency leaders have made no secret behind how they want to crack down on direct-to-consumer pharma ads. But as Stat reported, though regulators have said they want to remove the pizazz from these commercials, the Super Bowl has remained largely exempt from that. (See again: Hims’s Super Bowl ad last year. Though it was called out, the FDA never weighed in, and it ultimately still ran during the game.)

All that to say, next year’s Super Bowl could look different and “will hinge on how aggressively regulators interpret fair balance on linear [TV],” Ramelli said.

“My intuition is we’ll see brands hedge,” he added, “then shift the heavier product detail into [connected TV] or second-screen formats where disclosures can live comfortably and consumers can opt into depth.”