Amid the celeb sightings, 1990s nostalgia, GLP-1s galore, sports betting promos, and AI overload from last night’s Super Bowl — the Backstreet Boys found themselves in their own battle between brands.
Their 1999 hit “I Want It That Way” was a surprise performance during T-Mobile’s 13th consecutive Super Bowl ad, which aired during the second quarter. It was flamboyant, silly, and riddled with celeb cameos from the likes of rapper-rocker Machine Gun Kelly, comedian Druski, and actor Pierson Fodé.
During the same quarter, a slightly rejiggered version of the iconic boy band’s “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” anthem showed up in a lo-fi karaoke-inspired ad that was eventually revealed to be an ad for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. The brand framed the spot as “an ode to crypto” in a blog post, saying it was meant to signal that crypto is for everyone, and pointing to the roughly 52 million Americans who have used it.
The idea to cast the band for T-Mobile’s spot, and license “I Want It That Way,” came from Andrew Panay, the producer of Wedding Crashers and head of Panay Films, which is responsible for many of T-Mobile’s flashiest commercial campaigns.
He decided to hire the group after a “spiritual” experience last summer watching the band perform at The Sphere in Las Vegas, he previously told ADWEEK.
But there was competition over licensing rights, as multiple brands were interested in using the song for a Super Bowl ad, Panay said. “I licensed the song, I put money down, and then more brands came after it,” he said. It almost amounted to a bidding war, he said, “but I stopped it.”
T-Mobile declined to comment.
Coinbase said it wasn’t one of the brands that went after “I Want It That Way,” and that it had planned to use “Everybody” since the early days of planning.
The brand’s karaoke-style spot came together quickly after the brand’s creative agency, the New York-based Isle of Any, proposed the idea in the fall of 2025.
It was a smooth process because the idea was “wildly participatory,” said Joe Staples, vice president of creative at Coinbase. The Super Bowl experience, he said, is like going to a karaoke, with the party atmosphere, the drinking, and people huddled around the TV like a campfire. “Same amount of people, same amount of inebriation, same amount of playfulness. It just seemed to fit.”
