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Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in NFL history (for now). He is not the greatest NFL broadcaster of all time (for now). So why is he calling the Super Bowl tonight, and why is Fox Sports paying him $375 million over 10 years—more than any other broadcaster in sports history—as if his excellence in the former job automatically qualifies him for the latter?

By the simplest conventional analysis, Brady’s initial returns make the contract look like a bad bet. His performance in the booth has received mixed reviews, to put things charitably. In a season when NFL ratings have declined overall, they fell more for games on Fox than on CBS, and more people tuned in to CBS on average to watch football than to watch Brady’s late-afternoon slot. In fairness, as Austin Karp at Sports Business Journal pointed out, the games on CBS this year happened to be closer in the fourth quarter, and many people watching Fox might have clicked away because the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Applying any normal ROI analysis to Brady’s contract is difficult for at least four reasons: He is not a normal person, “celebrity sports broadcaster” is not a normal job, the NFL is not a normal industry, and televised football is not a normal business.

For starters, Tom Brady is … uh, Tom Brady. (Yes, this is the high-quality analysis you come to The Atlantic for.) He is the GOAT of quarterbacks by conventional career statistics; he is also the most decorated quarterback in NFL history by championships, a part-owner of an NFL franchise, one of the most famous people in the world, and one of the most annoyingly handsome people alive. If you want somebody with this résumé (or, frankly, even trace elements of this résumé) to commit to working with you for a substantial period of time, you’re going to part with a gargantuan amount of cash.

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Even when they’re not all-time talents with supermodel jawlines, NFL broadcasters are paid like kings. Al Michaels, the legendary play-by-play guy with Amazon, is reportedly paid $15 million annually. So is the nearly-as-legendary Joe Buck, at ESPN. Tony Romo, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback who provides occasionally oracular commentary for CBS, gets closer to $17 million a year. At $37.5 million a year, Brady’s salary seems eye-bleedingly high compared with basically any job, but in the context of other famous commentators, his salary is merely eye-watering.

Nor is Brady just an NFL broadcast personality; he’s a celebrity NFL broadcaster. Celebrity television hosts are mascots, emcees, and gold-plated utility players. For example, Jimmy Kimmel is not only paid handsomely to host a late-night show; he’s also well known within Disney for being the ultimate team player who’s game to schmooze a big advertiser in a pinch or to host the Disney “upfronts,” where the networks show off their upcoming programming to advertisers and media. Fox Sports can theoretically use Brady in a similar way. For their latest IndyCar promotional campaign, Fox taped a short cameo with Brady joking about his jawline. How much marginal ad revenue will the Fox Sports analytics department assign to that one Brady spot? I have no idea, but the very possibility of being able to deploy Tom Frickin’ Brady as a corporate asset is worth an amount of money that exceeds his immediate value as a broadcaster.

There’s another way that Brady’s value to Fox Sports might be greater off-camera than on. Ratings seem more sensitive to the quality of the matchup than to the quality of the commentary from the broadcast booth. At a time when the NFL is trying to expand to streaming—sending Thursday games to Amazon and Christmas games to Netflix—Fox needs every edge it can get to negotiate the best games. Brady, who might be able to leverage his deep connections to the league in a pinch, is the rarest asset. He helps Fox present its broadcast to the league in terms that no other network can match: “We have the GOAT. They don’t.”

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Football bestrides American culture like nothing else. It is the last vestige of the defunct 20th-century mainstream and the keystone to the entire multi-hundred-billion-dollar cable bundle. Last year, the NFL accounted for 72 of the 100 most watched television broadcasts. The previous year, football accounted for 93 of the top 100. (Election coverage and an unusually high-profile World Series accounted for almost all of the difference.) Every year, Fox Sports spends about $2 billion every year for the rights to broadcast NFL games. Tom Brady’s contract is less than 2 percent of that annual licensing fee. Because protecting the relationship with the NFL is worth tens of billions of dollars, an understandable calculation from Fox Sports could be: Does it really make sense to play moneyball with the NFL, or should we just suck it up and pay a 2 percent GOAT tax to guarantee that the most famous person from the most important cultural industry is ours for the next decade, as streaming giants threaten to crash the gates?

Look at it one way, and Tom Brady is paid almost $40 million a year to provide a television service that doesn’t seem to actually drive television viewership. But look at it another way, and you can see Brady as a corporate mascot, a brand-marketing tool, a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency asset, and an affordable “tip” to pay the NFL on top of its licensing deal to secure the best football matchups, which actually do drive viewership.

The ad that Hims & Hers Health plans to air during the Super Bowl comes at you with rapid-fire visual overload—a giant jiggling belly, bare feet on scales, X-ray results, sugary sodas, a pie in the oven, a measuring tape snug around a waistline—all set to the frenetic hip-hop beat of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A disembodied voice warns: “This system wasn’t built to help us. It was built to keep us sick and stuck.” The Super Bowl spot is a strikingly dark, politicized way of getting at the company’s latest initiative: selling weight-loss drugs to both women and men. The ad also marks a pivot for the telehealth company colloquially known as Hims, which rose to prominence just under a decade ago, slickly marketing hair-loss treatments and erectile-dysfunction drugs to men.

Since Hims’s founding in 2017, the company has been pointing toward a very particular future, one in which the word patient is interchangeable with customer. The Hims brand has primed people to view both their everyday health and the natural-aging processes as problems that can be tweaked and optimized—as if it were peddling operating-system updates for the human body. Now, as the national mood and the business environment shift, Hims’s message is undergoing its own reboot.

Catering to male anxiety can carry a company a long way: If you’re a man in your 30s, as I am, ads featuring Hims’s signature branding—a hip font on a bright background—have become inescapable across Instagram and Facebook. Hims sells all manner of pills, supplements, shampoos, sprays, and serums. Central to the Hims pitch is the fact that many people, especially younger men, avoid regularly going to the doctor; a recent Cleveland Clinic survey found that less than a third of Millennial and Gen Z men receive annual physicals. Hims markets the telehealth experience as a welcome alternative. After filling out an online intake form and communicating with a licensed provider from its partner group about hair loss, for example, you might be prescribed a Hims-branded chewable. One such offering, advertised at $35 or more a month, contains minoxidil, a medication that first hit the market in the 1980s as Rogaine, combined with finasteride, which most people know as Propecia, plus supplements.

On platforms such as Instagram, under the logic of targeted advertising, if you linger over an ad for one hair-growth supplement, similar ads will follow. In my daily tapping and scrolling through the app, Hims ads began to appear everywhere—and eventually got in my head. Some time last year, my self-interrogation started: How long has my hairline had that peak? Was my forehead always that … giant?

“The job of marketing is to influence behavior, and sometimes that means identifying problems that you may not know that you have, or underlying insecurities that may prevent you from losing social currency down the road,” Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan, told me. A former advertising executive, Collins said that he, too, had been bombarded by Hims ads. He could see how Hims was trying to “elevate itself from being a shortcut that represents a hair-loss solution to being a solution for masculinity, to being an outlet for him, for what it means for manliness.”

In December, after my dermatologist examined my scalp during an annual skin screening, I sheepishly asked her about Hims. She rolled her eyes. When we moved to discussing treatment options, she also warned me that a potential side effect of using oral finasteride for hair growth is decreased libido, erectile dysfunction, or both.

After a few minutes of discussion, a topical solution seemed like a better bet than the pill. But there is nothing special about Hims itself. “If you want, I can just call in a minoxidil-finasteride solution to your pharmacy,” my doctor said. “It’ll be cheaper.” She saw me as her patient, not an e-commerce shopper. Still, the fact that I asked about Hims at all made me feel like the company’s pervasive marketing was working on me. One minute, I was reporting, checking out Hims-branded biotin gummies; the next minute, I was practically at the checkout, ordering some myself.

When I spoke with Mike Chi, Hims’s chief commercial officer, he leaned hard into words such as normalization and empower. I told him that the constant barrage of Hims ads had made me feel almost bullied into doing something about my hair. Chi disagreed with my characterization but acknowledged the high volume of the company’s ads. The goal of its campaigns, though, was “to create an emotional connection with a customer,” he said. “And to create that personal connection with a customer, we often have to have varied messaging to find the way in that connects with them.”

Even though Hims’s ubiquitous stuff-for-dudes marketing campaign has proved effective at tapping into male insecurity, treating masculine vulnerabilities with generic drugs has its commercial limits, and Hims faces growing competition in the space. A company called Ro (formerly Roman) has a model similar to Hims’s; Amazon has an online pharmacy and telehealth business. In the past several years, Hims has steadily expanded its business into a broader array of treatments for both men and women: antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication—and, as the Super Bowl spot indicates, weight-loss drugs that include a version of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy. Semaglutide is currently on the FDA drug-shortage list, a status that allows Hims and other companies to sell their own compounded versions. (The makers of Ozempic are urging the FDA to declare an end to the semaglutide shortage.) Going down the compounded glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) path is a bold gambit for Hims. The market for a monthly supply of hair-growth or erectile-dysfunction pills is limited to men in certain age brackets, but the perpetual quest for thinness and hotness transcends demographics.  

By some measures, Hims’s expansion has been successful. The company has accumulated more than 2 million regular customers and achieved a market cap of $9 billion. Last February, the company announced its first profitable quarter. Marketing accounted for 45 percent of Hims’s operating expenses during last year’s third quarter. Peter Fader, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me that such a percentage is “absolutely high” when it comes to typical marketing costs in a successful operation. “And it’s not sustainable, either,” he added. “A lot of people do question [the company’s] long-term viability,” he said, but he also commended Hims for “rolling with the times.”

Although Hims’s stock has gone up 65 percent in the past month, investment experts seem split over the reason. Some appear confident in the value of the company’s prospects. Others, such as the CNBC host Jim Cramer, suspect that Hims’s surging stock price is the effect of a “short squeeze,” in which speculators’ bet on a future steep decline temporarily boosts the share price.

Even the Super Bowl ad carries pitfalls for Hims. On Friday, Senators Dick Durbin, a Democrat, and Roger Marshall, a Republican, sent a letter to acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner stating that Hims’s “Sick of the System” commercial “risks misleading patients by omitting any safety or side effect information” about an injectable weight-loss medication that appears in the ad. In response, a Hims spokesperson told me in an email, “We are complying with existing law and are looking forward to continuing working with Congress and the new Administration to fix the broken health system.” The person went on to imply that the company’s critics are defending the status quo. “The ad calls out industries that are part of a system that fails to prioritize the health of Americans,” the spokesperson said. “And now these industries are asking to shut the ad down.”

Hims is now doing business in a world where a concept such as “Make America healthy again” has rapidly migrated from a fringe political movement to the center of government. And although MAHA purists might shun pharmaceutical solutions, some potential customers might be sympathetic to Hims’s claim of being an ally against “the system.” The one-note, full-volume message in the Hims Super Bowl spot is that everything is rigged against you—keeping you overweight, making you unhealthy—and that you’re right to be mad about that.

The company could be betting that in a political moment when talk of needing more “masculine energy” is playing an outsize part, this vibe shift in its marketing strategy will help it reach an even bigger audience. Hims has done well selling its own recipes for masculine energy; now it figures it can do even better pushing remedies to help you take back control from the elites and make you feel great again. It’s audacious, possibly cynical, and probably very effective.