In-Game or In-Sync? Winning the "Second Screen" Scrimmage

Brands know what that moment costs. Reported pricing for a 30-second spot is averaging around $8 million, with some placements crossing $10 million this year.

The mistake is thinking that the investment ends with the spot.

Because the broadcast is only the master narrative now. The business outcomes are won in the messy, fast-moving layer that sits beside it: the second screen, the scroll, the search, the group chat, the clips, the shopping overlays, the “wait, what was that brand?” moment, the impulse to act while the game is still happening.

That layer is where the Super Bowl becomes measurable. Or wasteful.

The moment got bigger. Attention got more divided.

It’s tempting to treat divided attention like a problem to solve. It’s not. It’s the current operating system.

Consumers don’t “leave” the game when they pick up a phone. They often go deeper into it. They check stats. They react in real time. They look up an actor, a product, a brand promise, a promo. They watch a replay because the broadcast moved on. They’re not stepping away from the moment; they’re extending it into the places where intent lives.

Surveys ahead of recent Super Bowls have consistently pointed to a majority of viewers engaging with the game across multiple screens or platforms. And research and industry reporting around streaming-era sports coverage keeps reinforcing the same direction: the event experience is now cross-platform by default.

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That creates a straightforward challenge for agencies and brands.

If your Super Bowl plan is “big spot, then social posts,” you’re not doing a second-screen strategy but are filling whitespace.

⚡ The broadcast spot creates shock and awe. The second screen decides whether it becomes impact.

Linear vs. liquid: the scrimmage is happening off the TV

Here’s a clean way to think about Super Bowl media in 2026.

• Linear is the master narrative: It’s the big-budget creative moment. It’s the celebrity cameo. It’s the comedy beat. It’s the sixty-second film you sweated over for months.
• Liquid is the scrimmage: It moves quickly and it moves everywhere. It flows between TikTok and live tweets, between sports apps and streaming menus, between Google searches and shoppable TV prompts. It’s where people trade reactions and take action.

That’s why the old funnel vocabulary fails here. “Awareness, consideration, conversion” makes it sound sequential and calm. Super Bowl behavior isn’t. It’s simultaneous.

The brands that win don’t merely “run campaigns across channels.” They synchronize. They anticipate the moments when attention spikes, and they show up with the right creative and the right offer in the right environment while the viewer is still in-game.

The most common failure mode: the $8M spot gets a plan, everything else gets improvisation

Most Super Bowl strategies are built like a pyramid: the TV spot is the top, and everything else is treated like supporting material.

That structure makes sense inside a linear world. It breaks in a cross-screen one.

In the liquid layer, outcomes don’t come from presence. They come from timing, context, and continuity.

• A snack ad hits during a tense third-and-long. The viewer laughs, then reaches for their phone to see who the actor was or to check if the brand is running a promotion.
• A car ad drops a new model reveal. The viewer searches the model name, not the brand.
• A retail brand runs a “big game deal,” but the offer isn’t discoverable in the first two search results, and the paid social creative doesn’t match the TV story, and the landing page isn’t built for game-night traffic.

The problem is operational coherence.

If your second-screen strategy isn’t running in lockstep with the live game flow, you’re paying for halo and leaving results to chance.

Walled gardens make the second screen easier to buy and harder to prove

In the liquid layer, the biggest temptation is also the biggest trap: chase the audience into closed ecosystems because the tools are convenient and the reporting looks clean.

Walled gardens are not “bad.” They’re powerful. But their incentives are not the same as yours. They optimize inside their own boundaries, using their own measurement, toward outcomes that often serve platform revenue before advertiser truth.

That matters most during tentpole moments, because the stakes are higher and the noise is louder.

When measurement becomes a platform-specific story, brands are left with a familiar frustration: everyone reports success, but nobody can explain which parts actually drove business impact.

This is where the Open Garden philosophy becomes less like a media preference and more like a governance requirement.

Open Garden: a strategy for visibility when the journey is fragmented

At AI Digital, we describe Open Garden as a practical stance: keep control, keep transparency, keep the ability to learn across environments.

Open Garden is not a rejection of the big platforms. It’s a way to avoid becoming dependent on any single one for truth.

In practice, it means:

• Cross-platform visibility instead of siloed reporting
• Neutral access to inventory rather than default prioritization of a platform’s owned supply
• Optimization tied to business outcomes rather than DSP-native proxy metrics

It also means demanding “glass-box” accountability: knowing where your ads ran, how supply paths were chosen, and what you paid for the media versus the machinery around it.

If the second screen is where intent shows up, Open Garden is how you make that intent measurable.

The unglamorous part that decides efficiency: supply path chaos under peak demand

Super Bowl week does strange things to programmatic markets. Demand surges, and the ecosystem behaves like it’s under stress.

Prices rise. Intermediary hops multiply. Inventory gets repackaged and resold. Quality variation becomes harder to spot quickly, and it gets easier for budgets to drift into “close enough” placements that look premium on a slide but don’t perform like premium in reality.

None of this is theoretical. The industry has spent years building transparency standards because the supply chain is complicated and can be opaque without deliberate controls.

• The IAB Tech Lab created tools like sellers.json to help buyers validate who is authorized to sell inventory.
• Advertiser groups like the World Federation of Advertisers have highlighted supply chain accountability as a core requirement for trust in programmatic.

The point isn’t to drown in standards. The point is to recognize the pattern: when you’re buying in the loudest marketplace of the year, inefficiency scales fast unless you have a supply discipline that can withstand it.

⚡ Premium creative deserves premium delivery. Otherwise you’re paying luxury prices for inconsistent product.

Smart Supply: premium precision when the market gets noisy

This is where Smart Supply fits, and why it matters specifically in a Super Bowl environment.

Smart Supply is designed to make programmatic supply behave more like a controlled, outcome-driven buy, especially when open exchanges are flooded with demand. The industry often labels this category “curation.” We think that word is too vague to be useful. What matters is the actual work:

• selecting high-quality supply
• filtering out low-value or unsafe placements before they reach your campaign
• reducing unnecessary intermediary hops that inflate costs
• verifying that what you bought is what you intended to buy

Smart Supply is built to stay neutral. It’s DSP-agnostic by design, and it’s explicitly meant to remove inventory bias that can appear when platforms prioritize their own supply. It’s also structured around deal IDs that are built for a specific inventory type and KPI, rather than “one-size-fits-all” packages.

Two practical operating modes matter here:

1. Deal libraries for broad KPIs and scaled buys (think completed views, quality reach, stable frequency).
2. Campaign-specific deals for tighter audiences or aggressive outcomes, designed to learn and adjust as performance data comes back.

This is the part of the story many Super Bowl advertisers underweight. They focus on what the creative says, and forget that programmatic delivery quality is often what determines whether the second-screen follow-on performs like a premium experience or like a leaky bucket.

The 2026 scoreboard: fewer proxies, more accountability

Here’s the line we draw for Super Bowl media in 2026:

If you can’t explain how the liquid layer drove business impact, you didn’t really run a Super Bowl strategy. You ran entertainment.

The scoreboard needs to move beyond vanity metrics that are easy to collect and hard to tie to outcomes. In practice, that means measuring what the second screen is actually doing for you:

• Brand lift signals where you can run them credibly
• Search demand during and immediately after the spot
• Site engagement quality (not just traffic volume)
• Commerce signals that reflect real intent, not accidental clicks
• Incremental outcomes where you can build a credible holdout or comparison

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The point isn’t to demand perfect attribution from a chaotic moment. It’s to demand defensible truth.

And that’s where Open Garden and Smart Supply connect into a coherent solution:

• Open Garden protects visibility across the fragmented journey.
• Smart Supply protects delivery quality when the market is inflated and noisy.

A practical playbook for brands “surrounding the game”

If you’re building a Super Bowl plan now, this is the checklist we’d push to the top of the room.

1. Treat the TV spot as a spark, not the system. The spot is the opening play. The drive is what follows.
2. Pre-build your second-screen continuity. Your social, CTV, video, and search presence should look and feel like the same story, not separate campaigns that happen to share a logo.
3. Decide what truth you need before you buy. If you can’t see where your ads ran and how the supply path was chosen, you’re giving up the ability to learn at the moment when learning is most valuable.
4. Protect premium delivery when demand spikes. Super Bowl auctions magnify inefficiency. Put supply discipline in place so you don’t pay top-dollar CPMs for mid-tier delivery.
5. Optimize with a real-time operating cadence. If you’re waiting for next-day reporting to adjust, you’re missing the game-night window when intent is hottest.
6. Measure outcomes executives recognize. The board doesn’t care that a platform reported a strong view-through rate. They care what moved: demand, consideration, revenue, retention.

Closing: sync or sink

A Super Bowl spot can still stop the room. Money and celebrity help with that.

What separates the winners now is what happens next—when the room immediately picks up its phone. That second-screen surge is where curiosity turns into intent, and where intent either gets captured cleanly or evaporates into noise.

Brands that treat digital as the connective tissue of game night build something sturdier than a single splash. They connect the broadcast moment to a coordinated follow-through: consistent creative, disciplined supply paths, and measurement that can stand up in a serious conversation. Brands that treat the second screen as an afterthought get what Super Bowl ads have always delivered in the worst case—applause, a few memes, and no clarity on what moved.

In 2026, the best Super Bowl ad isn’t the one everyone quotes on Monday. It’s the one that can show what changed on Tuesday.

If any of this resonated—and you’re thinking about how to build a smarter plan around your next big moment (the Super Bowl, the Olympics, a product launch, a category tentpole)—let’s talk. We’re always up for a real conversation and a productive discussion about what’s possible, what’s practical, and how to make the next one measurable.

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