When is $10 million worth $10 million?

What if the answer was, for the first time in human history, the extortionate price of a premium Super Bowl :30?

The argument is straight-ahead:

First, let’s admit that Super Bowl ads are not and haven’t really been “advertising” in the conventional sense for decades. Not since Apple radically tore up the playbook with “1984.”

Instead, they’re as much gobsmackingly priced PR stunts as anything else.  And the real goal is, plain and simple, making news.

All those other goodies like brand- and sales-lift, not to mention the crack high promise of “shaping culture” are out there — but that’s all downstream.

As such, they operate under their own damn rules. 

After all, there really is no other event where the advertising is so intensely viewed, discussed, and dissected. Which, by the way, is why Pepsi can get away with brazenly ripping off the market leader’s famously polar mascot without much risk of brand confusion or failed attribution.

It’s also the rationale for blowing off all the delicious suspense that used to come from seeing the ad for the first time on the gasp, actual game.

But that’s a digression. More on point is that getting the kind of attention you get from making news has always been brand useful, if maybe not a bulletproof $3- $6-, and now $8 to $10-million worth of "useful."

What’s changed is something that dwarfs even the biggest of big shows and also operates under its own damn rules.

Google articulates them as “E-E-A-T” — “Expertise-Experience-Authority, Trust” — and they are, of course, the broad framework LLMs follow in choosing who to include in the already-ubiquitous AI overviews and recommendations.

To show up, you need to E-E-A-T well. And to do that, you need AI-registering visibility.

No spoiler here: one of the top ways to get that visibility is, you guessed it, making news.

What’s that going to be worth if it propels your product, service, and brand into both the charmed circle and the end zone in a time when consumers are spiking from roughly 37% to as much as 60% adoption of AI as the “answer engine?”

Maybe $10 million. At least, for now.

And there's the punchline: mostly, we're all consumed by disruption changing everything. This time, disruption could also mean more of the same. A whole lot more.