Svedka Offers $500,000 for a Fan-Made Super Bowl Ad

Svedka Vodka will pay one creator $500,000 to make its next Super Bowl commercial. The brand's distributor, Sazerac, opened the contest on November 2 and will accept 15-second ads for Svedka Vodka Water, a new cocktail offering, at biggamecontest.svedka.com until 11:59pm ET on December 1. Entrants must be 21 or older.

The move follows Svedka's AI-assisted 30-second spot in Super Bowl LX, which revived the brand's old "fembot" character and ignited debate over whether artificial intelligence should replace Madison Avenue creativity. Sales, not just chatter, followed.

What did the AI spot actually do for the brand?

Online forums erupted in criticism of the AI ad, but Sara Saunders, group president and chief marketing officer at Sazerac, says the numbers tell a different story. Svedka has "shown very strong double-digit growth for the past nine months in a category that has been down in an industry that has been down," she said in a recent interview.

Sazerac acquired Svedka in 2024. Saunders says the company expects the contest to spark new rounds of conversation around the vodka brand, which sits in a portfolio that also includes Buffalo Trace and 1792.

How much does the airtime cost?

Sazerac moved early to secure 30 seconds of Super Bowl inventory from Disney, which will telecast Super Bowl LXI on February 14. People familiar with the discussions say half a minute of Big Game ad time has been selling for around $8 million or more. Sazerac also plans a second 15-second commercial during the game for another product Saunders declined to specify.

The $500,000 prize, in other words, is roughly one-sixteenth of the media buy it accompanies.

Who is judging?

Svedka has tapped Andy Cohen to help judge the entries. Saunders argues he is built for the job in an era of hostile comment sections. "How do you address controversy and mean tweets with a better person than Andy Cohen? He lives in it. He thrives in it," she said.

Cohen, who appeared in a Nerds candy Super Bowl ad earlier this year, agreed. "Look, I am used to hearing so much viewer feedback from so many different directions and putting people on the spot," he said. "I think that the fact that they're bringing me in to do this is so genius, and it's so organic."

To launch the contest, Svedka will release a video of Cohen interviewing the fembot about reactions to her recent ad. "We just felt like he was really the right fit to have that dialogue with her," Saunders said.

Is fan-made Super Bowl advertising new?

No — PepsiCo's Frito-Lay ran the precedent. Its "Crash The Super Bowl" contest, launched in 2007, solicited amateur ads for Doritos and ran for nearly a decade, producing some of the most popular spots aired during the NFL broadcast. Doritos revived the contest in 2025.

Sazerac executives say they expect submissions ranging from AI-generated and low-budget work to near-cinematic pieces. The company will give entrants free access to a digital toolkit with creative assets, including images of Svedka Vodka Water, so no purchase is required.

What are the rules and the timeline?

• Ads must center on Svedka Vodka Water.
• The company will suggest, but not mandate, use of the fembot. "We are not mandating that," Saunders said.
• Svedka must vet entries, clear them against Disney's standards, and announce a winner, hopefully by mid-December.

"It's a sprint," Saunders said of the compressed timeline.

Cohen advises contestants to think broadly. The Super Bowl commercial is "the most mass thing that you can possibly do," he said. "There is no more mass piece of entertainment than the Big Game and everything around it."