Meta heads to the Super Bowl to tout its smart glasses—again

Meta is looking to give Super Bowl viewers some fashion advice this year.

The tech company is bringing its smart glasses collab with Oakley to the Big Game with a new campaign, its second consecutive ad focused on wearable tech. The spot, called “Athletic Intelligence is Here,” features athletes including former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch, pro golfer Akshay Bhatia, and Olympians Sky Brown, Kate Courtney, and Sunny Choi engaging in athletic feats while sporting Oakley Meta’s HSTN and Vanguard models. (It’s not just athletes: Director Spike Lee and streamer iShowSpeed appear in the ad, too.) The action-packed 60-second spot will air as two 30-second-long cuts in the first and third quarters of the Big Game.

“We think that the best way to tell the story of what the glasses do is by having people use them and having them tell the story for us authentically,” Alex Himel, VP of augmented reality at Meta, told Marketing Brew. “We’ve really tried to make sure that we’re just getting the glasses in the hands of people who will enjoy them and will do fun things with them, whether that’s climbing the Empire State Building or running a marathon or just capturing everyday moments at home with kids.”

Fashion killer: The spot opens with Lynch, who got the nickname “Beast Mode” during his NFL career, shouting, “Hey Meta, play my Beast Mode playlist,” before he jumps out of a plane and begins skydiving toward a football. Other scenes picture Brown riding a skateboard in a skate park, iShowSpeed sprinting toward a moving plane while capturing content for a social post, and Courtney falling off a bike into the mud and asking Meta if it’s okay to eat it. Bhatia queries Meta about the timing of a storm before executing a drive, while Lee instructs Meta to film a basketball game he’s watching in slow motion.
The Super Bowl is a relevant spot to show up for Oakley Meta, Himel said, given the athletic nature of the product. Oakley also has had a standing sponsorship of the NFL through 2030. He also noted that Meta smart glasses were used in various ways to document last year’s Big Game, including by a halftime show dancer filming the performance and others recording on-field footage after the game ended.

“Most of the work to date had been really focused on the product capabilities,” Nika Rastakhiz, head of strategy at Meta’s agency partner Mother LA, told Marketing Brew. “But now the big challenge was, How do we get attention in mainstream culture while also resonating within sports culture?”

Music to my ears: A key component of Oakley Meta’s Super Bowl spot is the soundtrack. The team chose rapper Travis Scott’s song “Hyaena” to accompany the visuals due to its “good energy and pace,” Camila Caldas, strategy director at Mother LA, said. It probably helped that Scott and Oakley had an existing creative relationship: the brand announced Scott as its “chief visionary” in June.

Everything, everywhere, all at once: In addition to appearing in the Big Game, the ad will show up on YouTube as well as Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Teasers for the ad had already garnered some buzz online, with 440 mentions, 83,000 engagements, and 93% positive sentiment related to it as of late January, according to iSpot.

Meta’s Super Bowl wearables ad this year comes on the heels of last year’s Big Game spot, “Hey Meta, Who Eats Art?” That ad, featuring actors Chris Pratt and Chris Hemsworth and Kris Jenner, shows Pratt and Hemsworth perusing an art gallery while wearing Meta Ray-Ban glasses. (The company also ran an ad promoting its Meta Quest headsets in the 2022 Super Bowl.)

Meta first got into wearables back in 2021, but its Oakley collab has only been available since last June. The company is going big on wearable tech, planning to pour about 70% of its operating expenses for its Reality Labs division into its wearables product this year, according to a January SEC filing. During Meta’s most recent earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said sales of its smart glasses nearly tripled in 2025 compared to the year prior.

“I think that we’re in a moment similar to when smartphones arrived, and it was clearly only a matter of time until all those flip phones became smartphones,” he said on the call. “It’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren’t AI glasses.”