Oogah.
Roughly 23% of the ads in this year's Snooze Bowl were AI-related, thus prompting SI to headline: "It Took Less Than a Quarter for NFL Fans to Be Sick of AI Ads During Super Bowl LX."
Seeming result: exactly zero brand lift from $120M to $160M in related category spending.
Then there was Ad Age's post-game poll, with the publication’s theoretically savvy readers voting the Bosch send-up of Guy Fieri's name ("Justaguy") top spot.
Funny thing, you might recall — although apparently, they did not —the same basic concept, if done with more wit and charm, was top scorer two short years ago via Michael Cera and Cera Ve.
So much for letting memories fade, at least a dab, before we “borrow.”
Speaking of best of breed, the USA Today number one featured a Budweiser horse making friends with a bird. Not sure patriotic predator love beats donkey love (2025), puppy love (2020, 2014), bull love (2010), or circus horse love (2009), but the path is surely well worn.
As to the rest of the mix? Bad Bunny aside, I don’t remember much, do you?
Next week, guaranteed, we’ll recall even less.
And that’s the damned point: if Super Bowl advertising is the canary in the creativity coal mine, this year’s flock should have us worried. Very worried.
Not just because it broke my ironclad “bad game/good ads and vice versa” rule.
But because, for all the effort that goes into making these things — and you can see the sweat stains from here — there were too many signs of surrender to ignore.
A zero-production cost :90 karaoke stunt that let the client pat themselves on the tush to the curious tune of chuckles from supposedly knowledgeable critics.
Lays is taking their sure-fired heart warmer of the little girl and her pet potato from last year and absolutely smothering it with a “looky-looky" logo in every scene.
Anthropic, who you have to like for not only staking out a position but making interesting spots to articulate it, forgot that you can’t jump to the epilogue before people finish the introduction.
Sadly, our eagle-eyed trade press seems fully complicit in the symbiotic crack high where the whole ecosystem, all reflecting deep financial interests, keeps pretending it’s been another jolly good year.
Even Ad Age’s Tim Nudd, about as close as you get to the storied advertising journalists in memory, struggled for the sugar coating: “Judging by this year’s crop, we’re collectively caught between gazing toward a hopeful yet uncertain future while pining for the past.”
Uh, where’s that hope coming from? More AI?
Yes, if you're comfortable with what risk-averse brand managers are going to insist on when being AI-visible is key to the charmed circle of the AI-defined consideration set.
So, how to fix it, before the race to the creative bottom becomes even more perennial?
As a former colleague used to tell me, “can't make history by repeating it.”
He was right. But that can’tstart until we admit where we are, then resolve to pull out of the dive.
Oogah.
BTW:
