But for the purposes of most companies, the Super Bowl is a paradox. It is an incomparable blockbuster for commercial exposure that is also a dud for most advertisers. And they know it.

Surveys of Super Bowl audiences have found that between 80 and 90 percent of the ads wash over audiences and don’t make them any more likely to buy the product on display. If one is skeptical of consumer surveys, as one should be, look at the academic papers. A 2013 study by Wesley R. Hartmann of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Daniel Klapper of Humboldt University Berlin, "Do Superbowl Ads Affect Brand Share?," found that commercials by beer and soda companies in the big game had a "null and/or insignificant effect" on revenue. The researchers found no relationship between ads and growth in sales per viewing household. Companies were spending millions of dollars for nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. The Super Bowl might provide a small lift for an advertiser like Coca Cola if no other soda companies participated in the spectacle. But Coke is annually negated by a similarly snappy ad from Pepsi. So, for the largest companies in the most competitive markets, the Super Bowl is more like the Prisoner’s Dilemma Bowl. Coke and Pepsi face a choice: One of them can advertise and eke out a little bit of market share. Neither can advertise and they both keep millions of dollars. Or both can advertise and, since the market share won’t budge, wipe out tens of millions of dollars just to maintain the status quo. In this sense, the Super Bowl is a glorified corporate battlefield where glitzy marketing armies fight to a stalemate.

That leads to the second irony of the Super Bowl, which is that the game is most valuable to the companies that can least afford it. As a general rule, advertising works best on consumers with little information. (When selling a sham headache remedy, it’s easier to convince a rube than a good physician.) The lesson applies to the Super Bowl, too. New companies and products get the biggest bang for the buck in the Super Bowl, because millions of people are hearing about them for the first time.

Take movies, for example. Another study of 47 Super Bowl commercials in 2011 found large spikes in search traffic for several advertisers, especially films, like Captain America and Super 8. The surge in interest started less than 15 seconds after the end of the trailers, “roughly the time it takes to think and type “captain america” into a computer," the researchers wrote. (GoDaddy.com, too, saw an enormous spike after its raunchy ad that year.) Movies that advertise in the Super Bowl don’t just get a search surge. They actually sell more tickets. A 2016 paper that looked at 70 films between 2004 and 2014 found that movies advertising in the Super Bowl saw a $8.4 million bump in the opening weekend box office from a $3 million Super Bowl spot. Movies that advertise in the big game tend to have larger marketing budgets overall. But even controlling for this, the Super Bowl premium is clear.