Squarespace's 2026 Super Bowl ad is confusing on first pass. And that's the point. Shot in black and white by Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone screams and stomps on a laptop while an ominous score swells. No context. No product. Only in the final moments does it reveal itself as a Squarespace commercial. It's their twelfth Super Bowl and it reflects a growing reality: the systems that measure success now reward curiosity more than clarity. 

Think about how we measure whether an ad worked in 2026. Search spikes. Social conversation. App downloads. Earned media. The dashboard doesn't have a row for "did the viewer understand what we sell." It has rows for "did they Google us." When that's the scoreboard, ambiguity looks more like strategy than risk. 

So is the math mathing? This year's game generated $550 million in earned media and 764 billion impressions on social. Top ads routinely drive several hundred percent increases in branded search. Brands are spending $25 to $30 million all-in on a single spot, more than most mid-market companies spend on marketing in a year. At that price, being forgettable is the worst outcome. Being confusing is not. 

Coinbase proved this in 2022 and I still think about it. A bouncing QR code on a black screen for sixty seconds. Half the people I was watching with thought the broadcast glitched. Twenty million hits in one minute. App surged from 186th to 2nd. Downloads spiked 309%. Platform crashed. Ad Meter ranked it dead last. People didn't like it. Didn't understand it. But they searched for it and talked about it for weeks. 

The playbook spread this year. Pringles' Sabrina Carpenter spot builds a man out of chips rather than selling taste or texture. EDO measured it at 1.8x the median for engagement. The weirdness did the selling.   

Some brands created confusion differently, by saying something so unexpected people didn't know how to react. Hims & Hers' "Rich People Live Longer," narrated by Common, isn't trying to make you laugh. It's trying to make you angry. Succession visuals, what looks like a Bezos figure stepping off a rocket. I watched it with a room full of people and nobody reached for their phone. Last year their spot generated nearly 8x the median engagement and a 650% traffic spike. This year, 2.2x. For a company doing $1.48 billion in revenue, being confrontational is the brand. Ro, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly all followed them in this year. 

Then there's the case study I can't stop thinking about. Full disclosure, I use Claude daily so I'm biased. But the data is wild. Anthropic's campaign included multiple spots showing AI sliding product pitches into genuine advice. Tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude." iSpot scored it bottom 3% for likeability across five years of Super Bowl ads. Purchase intent 24% below norms. Most common viewer reaction: "WTF." Only 7% of consumers know what Claude is. Traditional scorecard says bombed. But Sam Altman posted on X calling the ads "dishonest" before they even aired. CNN, CNBC, TechCrunch all covered the beef. EDO shows Claude at 2.8x the median for engagement. An ad nobody liked, nobody understood, yet the CEO it attacked couldn't stop talking about. Coinbase all over again. 

Not every brand can afford this. If you're launching a product with a real functional benefit, ambiguity might cost you. But when you're spending $30 million to reach people watching a game, scrolling two apps and group texting reactions, clarity competes with chaos. Chaos wins. 

Bernbach said advertising is the art of persuasion. What's changed is what persuasion looks like when $550 million in earned media is sitting there. The ads that last from this Super Bowl aren't the ones with the clearest message. They're the ones that made you confused enough to keep talking.