Everyone Watches a Different Super Bowl
The Super Bowl remains the largest shared media event in American life, but it now operates less as a football championship than as a national stage for culture, politics, and performance. Super Bowl LX is expected to draw more than 120 million viewers, yet much of the pregame attention has little to do with the matchup itself. Headlines are already dominated by Bad Bunny’s halftime show and by President Donald Trump’s decision to skip attending the game — figures who, for many viewers, matter more than the teams on the field.
If news media is running pre-Super Bowl digital articles about political figures and anti-ICE controversies, those headlines are being consumed by some audience, and those clicks generate revenue for the media companies. There were also already several reports dissecting the biggest Super Bowl LX advertisements prior to the game, spoiling the surprise and revealing most marketing strategies. That imbalance says something important about where American culture is in 2026. The Super Bowl still gathers a massive audience, but the audience arrives carrying different expectations, loyalties, and media consumption habits. What once functioned as a shared civic ritual now plays out inside a fragmented ecosystem shaped by personalization, algorithms, and digital subcultures.
For most of the Super Bowl’s history, its appeal to advertisers was straightforward: one night, one screen, one audience. Brands paid a premium to speak to the country all at once, trusting that viewers would absorb the same jokes, celebrities, and emotional beats together. Today’s dominant advertising model works in the opposite direction. Online, success comes from narrowly delivering tailored messages to specific demographics based on data, not shared experience.
The Super Bowl remains one of the few media events where narrowcasting is impossible, and that cultural dissonance is visible everywhere.
It explains creative choices like Instacart pairing Ben Stiller with pop singer Benson Boone. Stiller brings a familiar comedic presence recognizable across generations. Boone is supposed to represent Gen Z’s algorithm-driven pop culture, but the reality is that not everyone in Gen Z is experiencing the “Mystical Magical” “moonbeam ice cream” singer, unless they happened to scroll past a TikTok video mocking his viral 15-second song clip back in 2025.
The football game no longer functions as a unifying cultural text so much as a shared timestamp; it is an anchor point around which millions of individualized experiences orbit.
Variety reported that advertisers aim to capture the attention of Gen Z, quoting Instacart’s chief marketing officer, who called Benson Boone the “Gen Z poster child” who is “so in the zeitgeist right now.” While it may be true that many Gen Z viewers could identify Boone in a police lineup, this does not equate to cultural influence. In social media, culture does not dictate what content people consume; people control what culture they experience — or at least which media platforms they are exposed to. Benson Boone is one of thousands of “big name” faces encountered by Gen Z across an endless scroll of online content, and only those who engage with the singer’s music would say he wields any “zeitgeist” power beyond the visibility brands throw his way in a family-friendly register.
This shift helps explain why the Super Bowl now feels simultaneously unavoidable and strangely hollow. Everyone is watching, but not everyone is watching for the same reasons. Viewers arrive with second screens in hand, primed to react on X, TikTok, or Instagram, parsing moments into clips, memes, and outrage cycles that immediately splinter the broadcast into competing narratives. The game itself becomes just one content stream among many, often secondary to whatever discourse can be generated around it.
In that environment, advertisers are no longer trying to create a single, universally resonant moment. Instead, they aim to seed fragments that will travel differently across platforms: a celebrity cameo that sparks TikTok edits, a quip engineered for ironic use, some anti-Trump bluster to whip up the Fox News anchors, an anti-ICE signal to excite the leftist activists, and so on. XFinity’s Jurassic Park reunion leans on 1990s nostalgia, while Uber Eats stuffs its ad with more celebrities optimized for online circulation rather than message clarity. These commercials are designed less for viewers in the moment and more for influencers, brand accounts, and media outlets that will remix, react to, and rank them afterward. The commercial is no longer the art form; the engagement funnel is.
None of this means the Super Bowl is dying. Its ratings suggest the opposite, although its role in American culture has changed. The football game no longer functions as a unifying cultural text so much as a shared timestamp; it is an anchor point around which millions of individualized experiences orbit. People still tune in, but they do for different purposes, paying attention to different things and extracting different meanings.
This may be the defining feature of American culture in 2026. The Super Bowl still gathers the country, but it won’t tell the country who it is. Instead, it reveals how fragmented America’s national identity has become in the face of global communications technology, and how easily we mistake engagement for relevance, visibility for influence, and shared screens for shared culture.
READ MORE from Julianna Frieman:
Gen Z in the Age of Digital Polyculture
Julianna Frieman is a writer who covers culture, technology, and civilization. She has an M.A. in Communications (Digital Strategy) from the University of Florida and a B.A. in Political Science from UNC Charlotte. Her work has been published by the Daily Caller, The American Spectator, and The Federalist. Follow her on X at @juliannafrieman