ESPN drops first ad for 2027 Super Bowl

The 2026 Super Bowl came to an anticlimactic close less than 24 hours ago, but ESPN is already priming fans for next year’s game.

The Big Game is a big deal for ESPN: Next year will mark the first time the Disney-owned network will broadcast the Super Bowl, and it will also be simulcast on ABC as its first Super Bowl in more than a decade. So Disney is pulling out all the stops, including airing its first promotional spot for the game starting today.

The ad leverages a significant portion of Disney’s sizable IP library—more than 60 characters from the Muppets to Moana to Marvel—in an effort to hype the 2027 Super Bowl up to anyone and everyone, not just sports fans, Disney execs told Marketing Brew.

“This is arguably the biggest entertainment event in the world…and this would be the time to really do something different and big, and maybe break some of the rules of how IP sits together,” said Carrie Brzezinski-Hsu, SVP of ESPN Creative Studio and creative execution for Disney. “How do we make this an invitation and show kids and families, and anybody, that the characters that you love also love sports and love the Super Bowl?”

“I’m going to Disney World!”

The campaign, called “We’re Going,” which debuted with a 60-second spot Monday on Good Morning America that will continue running on Disney networks for the next couple of weeks, has been in the works for about two years, according to Tina Thornton, ESPN’s EVP of Creative Studio and marketing.

Technically speaking, though, it all started almost 40 years ago, she said, when the New York Giants won the Super Bowl and quarterback Phil Simms shouted, “I’m gonna go to Disney World!” It kicked off a longstanding tradition of Super Bowl MVPs making a pilgrimage to the park.

For the first piece of creative in the campaign, set to continue unfolding throughout the year, Thornton said her team wanted to “flip the script” on Simms’s iconic declaration. Instead of Super Bowl champs announcing that they’re going to Disney in the spot, Disney characters declare their intentions of going to the Super Bowl.

Combining such a massive content library into one ad was no small feat. The creative team pitched the concept to Asad Ayaz, chief marketing and brand officer of the Walt Disney Company, right after last year’s Super Bowl, Brzezinski-Hsu said; the team was still editing it well into last week.

The whole effort marks “one of the biggest cross-Disney campaigns that we’ve done,” Thornton added.

Never enough

Hundreds of millions of people across the country watch the Super Bowl every year. Last year’s game averaged a record-breaking 127.7 million TV and streaming viewers in the US, even though it wasn’t exactly a nail-biter. So why exactly is Disney throwing its full marketing might behind pitching what is already the biggest sporting event of the year?

Put simply, execs at the House of Mouse want to invite even more people in the door.

“All of this IP has a different set of audiences,” Thornton said. “Some are sports fans. Some are not…If there are little things that we can do to even increase that [viewership], that’s our goal.”

With next year’s Super Bowl being ESPN’s first, the creative team also wants to make it as clearly Disney and ESPN-branded as possible, Brzezinski-Hsu added.

The current spot won’t be the last that fans see from Disney ahead of the Super Bowl. New ads are set to roll out in time with other tentpole sports moments like March Madness and the NFL Draft, Thornton told us. The creative will eventually shift to be more of an “ESPN version,” she said, but the marketing approach will continue to take a page from other parts of the company, like the film studios.

“We’re really leveraging the full power of the Walt Disney Company to reach all of these audiences,” Thornton said. “When we have a big tentpole film, or when we’re giving a significant treatment to a Disney experience of some kind, we’re going to give this the same full marketing treatment.”