Is the era of really good Super Bowl ads over?
When even the ads want to take the day off
For years, the Super Bowl ads were the main event.
The game itself was almost secondary, an excuse to gather, gorge on devilled eggs, miniature cocktail hotdogs, seven layer bean dip, chips, and guac, all while watching million-dollar mini-movies that tried to be funny, strange, brave, or at least memorable between plays. The ads weren’t just commercials. They were cultural snapshots. Sometimes ridiculous. Sometimes subversive. Occasionally brilliant.
This year, for the first time in a long while, I found myself genuinely enjoying the game more than the ads.
And that surprised me.
A parade of technology—and reassurance
The dominant theme of this year’s Super Bowl ads wasn’t humor or creativity.
It was technology. A lot of technology.
AI assistants. AI search. AI research. AI productivity. AI summaries. AI automation. Platforms promising to remove friction. Apps promising control. Tools designed to make life easier, faster, smoother, lighter.
The list was long. By halftime I was practically numb to them all. But they kept on coming, all the way to the last play when the Seahawks confidently walked off the field with a 29-13 win over the Patriots.
And layered on top of it all was a consistent emotional message:
Don’t worry. We’ve got this. Everything is okay.
Not one ad challenged or provoked or asked us to pause. Not one ad disrupted the forward march toward a future many of the companies are working very hard to define and control for us.
If anything, the ads whispered:
Let’s make life easier. Let’s reduce effort. Let’s keep moving.
Given our current VUCA climate, that feels… about right.
From persuasion to inevitability
Some ads promised relief.
Others skipped the anesthesia and went straight to destiny.
AI.com, for example, didn’t tell a story or crack a joke. Their message was blunt:
Get your handle now. AGI is coming.
I wonder how many viewers even understand what AGI stands for, let alone why they should pay attention to it — or not — when digging deeper into their bag of Lays potato chips delivered seamlessly by tapping an app on their phone is far more satisfying?
These weren’t ads so much as land grabs, quiet reminders that the future is assumed to be arriving with or without you. Better position yourself now.
When ads stop trying to persuade and start assuming compliance, something has shifted.
Creativity doesn’t disappear in moments like these. It simply becomes unnecessary.
Ferris Bueller, automation, and opting out
One ad tied the whole mood together perfectly.
“Let Genspark automate your work and take the day off” the confident voice over said as a mature Matthew Broderick channeled Ferris Bueller in a modern office setting with people sitting in front of computers toiling to generate spreadsheets and slide decks.
It was clever, nostalgic, and deeply telling. Ferris Bueller symbolizes the aspirations of Gen X as it existed back in a pre-internet world: fight the power, disregard authority, live your best life on your terms, even if it means not doing a whole lot of anything productive to achieve that state.
But while it looks like Ferris Bueller is a hero of effort or mastery, he’s actually the avatar of opting out—of clever avoidance, consequence-free rebellion, and beating the system without changing it.
The promise wasn’t empowerment; it was permission to disengage, which many of us did while continuing to (reluctantly) strive toward the future laid out on a well-worn path before us.
This ad did not ask us to think better or choose more wisely. Rather, it encouraged us to clock out because someone else (e.g. Big Tech) will handle it.
That fantasy lands right now because people are not just overstimulated, but flat out exhausted, afraid at a deep level they’re trapped in systems they no longer understand and can’t do anything about.
Which is why the ad didn’t sell productivity; it sold a form of numbing agent to an audience who is overloaded and will do (just about) anything to lighten that load.
Even care is being optimized now
Hims & Hers added another layer to the night’s story.
Their message sounded hopeful, borderline altruistic.
The health gap, they said, is finally within reach. You don’t have to be ultra-rich anymore to access personalized health information tailored to you.
On the surface, that’s a genuinely good thing.
But it also fits the broader pattern perfectly.
Health, like work and finance before it, is being reframed as a data problem, something solvable through access, personalization, and optimization.
The implicit message isn’t: What does health really mean? but rather: We can finally scale it.
Care itself is now framed as something we manage through dashboards and insights. It has become another domain where efficiency stands in for becoming attuned and paying attention to what’s going in with you and your body.
The “meh” thesis, distilled
One ad captured the entire night more cleanly than the rest.
YouTube TV positioned itself around a simple premise: everything else is kind of… meh. Except life on YouTube TV.
That was the pitch.
No story. No risk. No real claim beyond: we’re slightly less boring than the other options.
I couldn’t stop chuckling about this ad’s timing at the front of the line, because most of the ads that followed felt exactly like what its message sent—competent, glossy, and ultimately forgettable. Not bad enough to critique. Not good enough to remember.
Essentially, meh.
When the most honest ad of the night accidentally mirrors the audience’s experience of the ads themselves, it stops being a joke and starts being a diagnosis.
Safe, polished, and strangely flat
To be clear, the ads weren’t bad. They just weren’t… great. Clearly a lot of time, money, and resources went into their polished, inoffensive construction. But there was very little real humor. Very little surprise. Very little creative risk.
Instead, we got the parade of familiar luminaries:
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. Scarlet Johansen and John Hamm. Matthew McConaughy and Bradley Cooper.
Familiar faces doing familiar things while pitching products that aren’t going to make a whole lot of difference to how amazing our life is or isn’t at the end of the day. I’m still scratching my head about Scarlet Johansson being a spokesperson for Ritz crackers.
The vibe wasn’t “remember when Super Bowl ads were weird and daring?” It was: We can’t afford missteps right now.
When corporations with massive budgets underwrite (what once was but may no longer be) the biggest cultural event of the year, safety tends to win in a climate of uncertainty, massive change, and a growing economic divide between the haves and have nots.
The few moments that landed
A handful of ads did cut through the hazy film of sameness.
“Belief is a superpower” from the NFL landed for me, not because it sold a product well, but because it spoke to something internal, not procedural. The tween kid in his room giving his stuffed animals and figurines a pep talk like his own football coach gives him and his teammates was genuine and touching. Authentic confidence building is contagious and the world needs more of it.
The vodka ad urging us to “shake your bots off” worked because it acknowledged the absurdity of the moment instead of pretending everything is seamless.
Two ads focused on fathers passing farms down to their daughters stood out. One—ironically for ChatGPT—showed a family digitizing a century’s worth of handwritten documents to generate a water-usage report.
The technology wasn’t the point. Responsibility was, and that dichotomy matters.
What Super Bowl ads used to ask—and what they ask now
Super Bowl ads used to reflect our collective aspirations and anxieties:
What makes us laugh?
What scares us?
What do we believe?
What kind of future feels possible?
This year’s ads mostly answered a different question:
How can we make life easier without asking anything of you?
And that leads to a more uncomfortable thought. Maybe the era of truly great Super Bowl ads isn’t over because creativity dried up.
Maybe it’s over because we no longer expect—or even want—to be challenged during the one moment that used to feel collective.
The Super Bowl isn’t collective anymore
The game used to be one of the last shared cultural events with everyone watching the same thing, at the same time, reacting together. Water cooler talk the next day at the office across the country, even the world, could last for days. Informal polls about which ads were awesome and which ones should never have been made filtered through cubicles and email chains and over lunch in the break room.
That may still be happening in offices and coffee shops today. There’s certainly a plethora of opinions flooding social media, but most of what I’ve seen so far is about the Bad Bunny halftime show rather than the lackluster ads. Turns out, a pop singer singing all his songs in Spanish is far more divisive and inflammatory than conversations about the crop of meh commercials.
What’s different from even ten years ago is now the ads leak early. Hours of commentary arrives before kickoff. The surprise is gone before the whistle blows.
There’s simply too much else competing for attention.
The Super Bowl is still massive, but it’s no longer singular.
And maybe that’s why the ads feel flatter now: because they’re designed for everyone and no one at once.
A quiet realization
For the first time in years, I didn’t worry I’d miss something if I left the room during the commercial breaks. The game was good, with a lot of solid defense from both teams. I was cheering for the Seahawks so of course I was happy with how the quarters unfolded.
My interest in the game more than the ads this year might say more about the cultural moment than the advertisers themselves. It may also point to how much I love the game of football but that’s a different topic for a different time.
What was overtly obvious to me after experiencing Super Bowl LX ads is this:
We’re living in a time that prizes:
Efficiency over imagination
Comfort over confrontation
Automation over attention
And our biggest ads reflect that perfectly.
So maybe the real question isn’t whether the era of great Super Bowl ads is over.
Maybe it’s What does it say about us that our biggest cultural mirror no longer tries to surprise us, only to reassure us that meh is good enough?