by Micah Berry, Associate Director of Technical Training, VCU Brandcenter
Super Bowl LX wasn’t just a championship game. It was a live demo of the thing I keep nagging creative teams about: AI isn’t a feature anymore. It’s a stack. And the stack is starting to demand receipts.
Sure, the commercials were loud. One analysis put AI in about 23% of the ads. That’s not a quirky “trend.” That’s a quorum. And the most revealing moment wasn’t even a dancing robot, it was a values fight in a $10-million-per-30-seconds arena: Anthropic buying airtime to dunk on OpenAI over ads, while OpenAI is simultaneously testing sponsored links inside ChatGPT. When tools become channels, “trust” stops being a brand vibe and becomes an important product spec.
But the bigger signal wasn’t in the ads. It was in the game itself.
On the field, the NFL’s Next Gen Stats program turns every snap into telemetry, tracking players ten times per second and feeding machine-learning models on AWS to generate advanced metrics. So the broadcast isn’t just describing what happened; it’s running an interpretation layer that helps decide what the story is. Pressure probability. Tackle probability. Separation. “That throw was risky… statistically.” The commentator is quietly becoming a narrator for models.
Then the stack shows its best side: accessibility. The league piloted OneCourt tactile devices for blind and low-vision fans, translating live tracking into haptics so you can literally feel the ball move and plays unfold. That’s not AI hype. That’s AI doing what technology is supposed to do for us: widen the room.
Even officiating is joining the operating system. The NFL adopted Sony’s Hawk-Eye virtual measurement tech as the primary method for measuring the line to gain starting with the 2025 season, speeding up a ritual that used to require a chain gang and a small parade.
And the last layer, the one creative and strategy leaders should really stare at, is measurement. X rolled out BrandRanx during the game: AI-assisted, real-time rankings built from millions of posts to track which ads broke through and what people did with them. That’s the receipt economy in action. Content doesn’t just air; it gets scored, live, in public.
Now the mischievous professor question: if we can track every player and score every commercial in real time… how long until broadcasts get personalized at scale? Not just “different camera angles,” but different storylines, different stats, different overlays, all based on what the system thinks you care about. I’m not claiming that happened at the game on Sunday. I’m saying the incentives are already on the field.
Here’s the spear tip: Super Bowl LX showed that AI isn’t “coming to creativity.” It’s already all around creativity… tracking, interpreting, distributing, measuring, and monetizing the moment. The future deliverable isn’t just the spot or the broadcast package. It’s the artifact plus its accountability layer: disclosures, provenance, consent, and performance telemetry.
In the near future, if you can’t ship with proof, it’ll be harder to ship. Period.
– Micah Berry, Co-Founder/CTO at Field Pattern, Associate Director of Technical Training at VCU Brandcenter
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