Monday, March 2, 2026
During Super Bowl 60, there were more multimillion-dollar commercials broadcast for AI (15) than points scored by the losing team, the New England Patriots (13).
AI either created or was the focus of 23% of the ads for America’s most watched annual entertainment event. Usually when a story becomes as pervasive as this, it means we’re near or at the height of the speculation. Interestingly, this is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.
In January 2000, the Super Bowl featured 14 ads from different dot-com companies. A year later, brokerage firm E*Trade ran an ad mocking all the dot-com ads a year prior, including one from the already defunct pets.com.
Still, the Internet reshaped our lives and still is today. A handful of businesses that advertised during that 2000 Super Bowl survived, like Web MD, Autotrader.com, and Monster.com. But they’re from high demand industries – health care, automotive, and recruiting, respectively.
Some of the dot-com era winners like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft didn’t have any high-priced airtime during the Super Bowl 25 years ago. And Facebook (now Meta) wasn’t even created yet.
More recently, in February 2022, cryptocurrency companies were paying millions to advertise during the Super Bowl. Later that year, one of those companies, crypto exchange FTX, went bankrupt. In 2023, no crypto companies were featured during the Super Bowl. This year, Coinbase was the only one to advertise.
Some trends and trend-following companies stick, and some don’t. AI being pervasive is one thing, but making a lasting business with it is something else.
Big tech companies aren’t going bust anytime soon. They’re spending at a parabolic rate (and facing increasing expectations from Wall Street). But other firms might not be so fortunate.
Daniel A. White is an investment advisory representative of and provides advisory services through CoreCap Advisors, LLC. Daniel A. White & Associates and CoreCap Advisors are separate and unaffiliated entities.