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By Amy Frankenthaler, Customer Success Manager at Suzy
There are Super Bowls where the ads blur together – funny, loud, forgettable.
And then there are Super Bowls where something clicks.
Super Bowl 2026 clicked.
Sitting on my couch, intensely watching the game (Go Pats!) and fully watching the ads, I noticed something unexpected… Across healthcare, pharma, and wellness, brands weren’t selling transformation, aspiration, or self-improvement…
They were selling time.
Not “look younger.”
Not “optimize harder.”
But stay well longer. Catch issues earlier. Protect the years ahead.
By the third or fourth spot that hit on this same emotional note, it stopped feeling coincidental. It was a signal.
Longevity had crossed from niche interest into emotional currency.
The ad that made the shift undeniable
If there was one ad that confirmed longevity had gone mainstream, it was this Hims & Hers spot.
Their Super Bowl 2026 spot, “Rich People Live Longer,” didn’t feel like a typical DTC health ad. It was blunt. Intentionally uncomfortable. And unmistakably cultural.
Instead of focusing on confidence or convenience, the ad framed longevity as an issue of access – who gets preventive care, who catches problems early, and who ultimately gets more years of good health. Longevity wasn’t positioned as a personal optimization goal. It was positioned as a structural advantage.
Watching it live, my reaction wasn’t “do I want this product?”
…It was: this feels like a cultural statement.
👉 Hims & Hers – “Rich People Live Longer” (Super Bowl 2026)
What made the spot powerful wasn’t just the message – it was the restraint. No over-explaining. No product overload. No emotional safety net.
This wasn’t a product pitch. It was a statement about who gets more time.
Preventive care, without fear
Hims & Hers wasn’t an outlier.
Another Super Bowl health spot took a very different creative approach – but landed in the same emotional territory.
Novartis’ prostate cancer awareness ad, “Relax Your Tight End,” used humor and familiarity to normalize screening rather than dramatize it. Featuring NFL legends, the spot reframed early detection as routine – part of staying in the game longer.
👉 Novartis – “Relax Your Tight End” (Super Bowl 2026)
As a viewer, it didn’t trigger fear or urgency.
It triggered reassurance.
Fear can drive short-term action.
Reassurance builds long-term trust.
That distinction matters – and it mirrors a broader consumer shift toward prevention as life maintenance, not crisis response.
Metabolic health reframed as durability
We saw the same trust-building approach in metabolic health and GLP-1 messaging.
Ro’s Super Bowl 2026 spot, featuring Serena Williams, positioned treatment not as a shortcut or cosmetic fix, but as part of sustaining performance, mobility, and wellbeing over time.
👉 Ro – Super Bowl 2026 commercial featuring Serena Williams
The framing wasn’t “change your body.”
It was “protect your capacity.”
That’s a critical shift in a category often defined by stigma or extremes. It ties metabolic health to longevity and endurance, not appearance.
Why these ads felt trustworthy (even before you agreed with them)
Across DTC health, pharma, and metabolic care, the strongest Super Bowl health ads shared the same creative DNA.
- They reduced noise instead of adding to it.
One clear idea. Minimal explanation. In a loud environment, restraint is read as confidence. - They avoided exaggerated promises.
No miracle claims. No instant transformations. Just protection, maintenance, and early action. - They treated the viewer like an adult.
No talking down. No oversimplifying. Trust assumes intelligence. - They normalized instead of dramatizing.
Screening, treatment, and care felt routine – not catastrophic. - They centered continuity, not transformation.
The promise wasn’t changed. It was staying yourself longer.
This aligns directly with what Harvard Business Review has found about emotional drivers of brand loyalty: messages tied to identity, security, and future confidence outperform functional benefit claims over the long term.
Even outside healthcare, the signal is spreading
Longevity thinking isn’t confined to healthcare brands.
Take Kellogg’s Raisin Bran, which used its Super Bowl moment to talk about fiber and digestive health – framed as something you do consistently, over time, to support wellbeing.
👉 Kellogg’s Raisin Bran “Will Shat” – Super Bowl 2026 commercial
The execution was playful.
The subtext was serious: small, repeatable behaviors that compound.
This is how longevity spreads – not as a headline claim, but as a mindset.
Why is this shift towards longevity happening now?
This didn’t come out of nowhere – it’s been building quietly for years. Healthspan language went mainstream (and increased exponentially with the pandemic).
Consumers are increasingly prioritizing healthspan – years lived in good health – over lifespan alone, a shift McKinsey identifies as foundational to the future of wellness across food, beauty, and consumer health categories.
The World Economic Forum echoes this, noting that modern wellbeing is being redefined around quality of life, not just longevity.
Prevention became the default mindset
Bain reports that prevention-first behavior – screening, recovery, metabolic health, daily maintenance – is a major growth driver, especially among consumers under 45 who want to protect future vitality rather than correct decline later.
Longevity resonates because it’s not about aging poorly; it is about acknowledging aging and preparing for it.
The economics caught up
The global longevity and anti-aging market is projected to surpass $120B by 2030, driven by demand for prevention, recovery, and healthspan-oriented solutions
Forbes has described this as the rise of a broader “longevity economy,” extending well beyond cosmetics into everyday health, nutrition, and preventive care.
When money follows mindset, trends harden.
What brands should do next (and what will go wrong if they don’t)
Here’s the uncomfortable truth coming out of Super Bowl 2026:
Most brands are still selling health the way consumers used to think about it.
And consumers have already moved on.
The brands that broke through weren’t louder or more inspirational.
They were calmer, more restrained, and more confident in the future they were selling.
1. Stop selling transformation. Start selling continuity.
If your messaging still centers on dramatic before-and-afters or fast results, you’re solving the wrong emotional problem.
Consumers aren’t asking to become someone new.
They’re asking for reassurance that they can stay themselves longer.
Transformation feels risky. Continuity feels safe.
And right now, safety is premium.
2. Reframe prevention as maintenance, not intervention.
The strongest Super Bowl health ads didn’t scare people into action.
They normalized the action.
- Screening felt routine.
- Care felt responsible.
- Treatment felt like upkeep – not last-ditch intervention.
If your brand only shows up when something is wrong, you’re already late.
3. Treat longevity as a platform… not a campaign.
Longevity can’t live in a single ad or tagline.
It has to show up across:
- product design
- benefit hierarchy
- tone and education
- partnerships and proof points
Consumers immediately know when longevity is just a veneer.
4. Expect longevity to look different by category – and by generation.
Longevity isn’t one message. It’s a lens.
Beauty → preservation over reversal; barrier health, resilience, recovery
Food & Beverage → daily inputs that compound; reliability over restriction
Pharma → early intervention and normalized screening
Fitness & wellness tech → mobility, recovery, durability
Financial services & insurance → planning for longer, healthier lives
Retail & services → reducing friction and fatigue in daily life
By generation:
- Gen Z → future-proofing performance
- Millennials → sustaining capacity under pressure
- Gen X+ → protecting independence and quality of life
Same emotional currency. Different translations.
The research implication
As longevity becomes emotional currency, brands need research that measures reassurance, security, and identity alignment — not just recall or short-term intent.
It’s not enough to know whether a message performs. Brands need to know whether it makes consumers feel more confident about their future — and whether it reflects their definition of aging well.
That’s where Suzy comes in.
Suzy’s agile quantitative research helps brands pressure-test longevity framing early, before it hits the market. And with Suzy Speaks, our AI-moderated conversational surveys, teams can hear directly from consumers — capturing the language, nuance, and emotion behind how people define longevity, healthspan, and prevention in their own words.
Because the real advantage isn’t knowing that longevity matters. It’s knowing what longevity means to your consumers — and building around that before you speak.
So the question is simple:
How do your consumers define longevity — and are you measuring the right things to understand it?
Closing the loop
The Super Bowl didn’t invent the longevity trend.
It validated it – emotionally, publicly, and at scale.
Watching these ads back-to-back made something clear: longevity resonates because it speaks to an unresolved question many consumers are carrying quietly:
Will I still be able to live the life I want in ten, twenty, or thirty years?
Brands that help answer that question will earn more than attention.
They’ll earn trust.
And right now, trust is the most valuable currency any brand can hold.
Book a Demo and see how Suzy Speaks conversational research can take your brand to the next level.
Suzy is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the National Football League (NFL). 'Super Bowl' is a registered trademark of the NFL and is used here for factual and descriptive purposes only.
