Super Bowl LX Ads: The Best and the Worst
- Savannah Sisk
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
Cameos, tech bros and bears — oh my!
By: Savannah Sisk
The average American is exposed to between 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day. We used to ignore most of them by easily skipping until two years ago, when Youtube made unskippable ads a frustrating reality for billions of users.
Unfortunately, streaming services were quick to follow suit. The commercial break has been replaced with a string of ads and a countdown clock in the bottom lefthand corner of your screen.
This could be bearable if the ads themselves weren’t so obnoxious. But alas, our corporate overlords have relegated us to an eternity spent with the Geico lizard and Flo from Progressive. Like the mediocre boyfriends of yesteryear, corporate advertisers have realized that they can get away with doing the bare minimum as long as they step it up every once in a while.
The Super Bowl is to advertisers what Valentine's Day is to your roommate’s nonchalant boyfriend: a chance to show her (and everyone else) just how much he cares. Trust me — if the Super Bowl did not present the perfect opportunity to love-bomb consumers, we would not be seeing this many high-quality, high-concept commercials. The Super Bowl is exactly the right time to overwhelm 100+ million consumers with attention and the occasional celebrity cameo.
Could ads be this thoughtful year round? Yes. Do corporations want to put in the extra effort? No. Unfortunately, for the time being we are stuck with Limu Emu…and Doug.
That being said, I still love a good ad. Like many young people with burgeoning shopping addictions, I have my debit card number memorized. So, without further ado, let’s get into my definitive ranking of this year's most memorable Super Bowl ads.
But first, a quick shoutout to Instacart’s ad, “Bananas.” Basically, Benson Boone and Ben Stiller are Italian brothers in an 80s music video. Boone does a backflip and Stiller gets jealous. Chaos ensues. Listen, we may disagree, but personally, I love that the entire ad revolves around the fact that Ben Stiller refuses to stop doing backflips.
…
Best Ad from a Company Actively Destroying the Fabric of Society: Coinbase’s “Everybody Coinbase”
Companies like DraftKings, ChatGPT and Meta really had to step it up this year. I noticed that the general strategy seemed to revolve around making ads so entertaining that consumers would have no choice but to overlook the underlying harm the brand brings to society.
An honorable mention goes out to DraftKings's frustratingly hilarious commercial featuring SNL Weekend Update hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che. Unfortunately, my disappointment in them for selling out to a corporation that targets young men and recovering gambling addicts was not strong enough to overpower my urge to laugh.
Xfinity released an ad in which their superior AI-powered grid technology enabled the flourishing of Jurassic Park, touting “a whole new species of WiFi”, while completely missing the point of the movie.
I would also be remiss not to mention OpenAI’s genuinely befuddling “You Can Just Build Things” commercial. Like…yes, I can. Without you. But I digress.
Ultimately, my favorite ad in this category was Coinbase’s karaoke-inspired “Everybody Coinbase” ad, which tricked millions of confused viewers around the globe into saying the name of a Crypto company. Do I think that crypto is dumb? Yes. Did the ad engage audiences in a unique, inventive way? Also yes. Two things can be true at once.
…
Best Use of a Child to Make Me Sympathetic About the Possibility of Using AI: Google’s “New Home”
A mother and her adorable toddler son use Gemini to imagine what their new house will look like once they have truly made it a home. The mother is seemingly doing this to ease her son’s worries about moving into a new house.
The ad argues that it is showcasing “A new kind of help from Google”, but…what happened to just using your imagination? Are we really so brain-dead that we have to ask AI to imagine what something could look like for us?
…
Best Wacky Celebrity Cameo: Squarespace’s "Unavailable"
This category was stacked. Shoutout to Bosch’s ad featuring Guy Fieri, T-Mobile’s “Tell Me Why (T-Mobile's Version)”, Pringles’s “Pringleleo” featuring Sabrina Carpenter, and Katseye’s five-second cameo in State Farm’s “Stop Livin' on a Prayer.”
In the end, Squarespace’s ad won because it was campy and irreverent in the way that all the best Super Bowl ads are. Emma Stone is absolutely freaking out over not being able to use the domain name emmastone.com. Tears are shed. Laptops are shattered. They really went there, and it paid off.
…
Best Ad That Actually Made Me Want To Buy Something: Levi’s “Backstory”
We all remember that one time American Eagle’s marketing team thought it would be a good idea to use eugenicist rhetoric to sell people jeans. GAP’s excellent clapback certainly raised the bar for denim advertisements.
Overall, I think this ad had the coolest concept: famous butts throughout history, all wearing Levi’s. We see the behinds of Woody from Toy Story, Bruce Springsteen, and Doechii, among others. Each time, that little red tag is truly unmistakable. Also, the song choice? Excellent. As I watched this commercial, I felt proud to be wearing a pair of Levi’s. What can I say? They’re iconic.
…
Best Beef: Pepsi’s “The Choice”
This commercial has everything: jokes, comparative advertising, and pop culture references galore. I actually cackled aloud when they lampooned the Coldplay concert cheating scandal.
Of course, an honorable mention goes out to Claude’s dig at a new update bringing ads to ChatGPT, which sent Sam Altman spiraling.
…
Best Exploitation of a Social Issue to Sell Me Things: Hims’ & Hers’ “Rich People Live Longer”
Rich people live longer because they have more money, and therefore better access to preventative healthcare. Thankfully, Hims & Hers is now providing you, the average middle-class consumer, the opportunity to throw money at the problem too.
Will the care that you receive be at all comparable to that which Jeff Bezos is receiving? No. Will it be better than nothing? Yeah, I guess?
…
Best “Sad Ad”: Lay’s “Last Harvest”
Everybody knows the “sad ad”. Whether it makes you tear up or gives you unheard of emotional whiplash, the “sad ad” is an integral part of Super Bowl advertising.
Ultimately, my favorite was Lay’s “Last Harvest,” currently sitting at no. 2 on USA Today’s Super Bowl ad meter.
“Last Harvest” is a real tearjerker about a Lay’s potato farmer who retires and leaves his farm to his daughter. She writes him sweet little notes and throws him a surprise retirement party. I cried, you cried, we all cried.
…
Worst Ad of the Super Bowl: Dunkin’s “Good Will Dunkin’”
I don’t even want to talk about it. I was excited. I was intrigued. I was immediately disenchanted.
Uncanny valley, AI-generated Jennifer Aniston banging on a glass window is truly the stuff of nightmares. Don’t even get me started on whoever that bartender guy was supposed to be.
In my mind, whatever money Dunkin' spent on this ad was wasted. I understand that they’re pandering to an older audience, but by choosing to put out this AI monstrosity, they spent every last cent of goodwill they ever earned with me.
Of course, an honorable mention goes out to Grubhub’s “The Feest”, which advertised no delivery fees…on restaurant orders over $50.
…
These days, good commercials feel like a breath of fresh air. They’re fun. They’re funny. They’re culturally significant. The best ads distill pop culture itself into a single 30-second clip. They make us laugh, they make us cry. They give us an introspective view of the society in which we exist.
So, if I must be bombarded by ads every second of the day, I would appreciate it if a little more care was put into their creation.
Regardless, I think we can all agree that the Super Bowl stands out as the biggest night in advertising for a reason. Adlandia has become a dreary, uninspired place. Super Bowl ads stand out as a beacon of creativity amongst the beige and flattish hills of consumerism.
Savannah Sisk is a first-year Advertising major at the University of Florida. This is her first semester writing for ROWDY. Her hobbies include reading, thrifting, and writing about herself in the third-person.