Here is my annual critical ranking of the Super Bowl commercials. Included are the new, national ads that were shown during the game itself.
The trends? Nothing controversial, as you would expect, but also – and perhaps for associated reasons – very little creativity. It was a bad year for ads; the ones at the top of this list aren’t much better than average. More spots than usual depended entirely on the appeal of a relatable celebrity (who was almost certainly male). Concepts beat ideas – there was a lot of fussy, overly complicated silliness and not much in the way of simple, effective storytelling or mood setting.
(The many regional ads, movie and TV trailers and house ads for Fox broadcasts are not included. And whatever that thing with Bill Murray was, it didn’t count.)
No 1: ChatGPT
Artificial intelligence may bring about the end of human life as we know it, but this pixelated, pulsating animation was the most purely pleasurable spot of the night.
No 2: Nike
Female athletes like Sha’Carri Richardson and Caitlin Clark compete and strike poses to a jackhammer beat in an arresting black-and-white production, Nike’s first Super Bowl ad since 1998.
No 3: National Football League
The NFL’s own feel-good promo, “Somebody,” is affecting in a highly produced, can’t-we-all-just-get-along manner. Its implicit endorsement of diversity and inclusion offers a muted contrast to the league’s decision to forgo the “End Racism” end-zone slogan.
No 4: Stella Artois
David Beckham learns he has a secret twin, who turns out to look a lot like Matt Damon. The ad is reasonably charming, and Ben Affleck jokes never get old.
No 5: Squarespace
Actor Barry Keoghan rides a donkey around ye olde rural Ireland (he’s back in the world of “The Banshees of Inisherin”), delivering customers’ websites by throwing laptops into farmyards and through pub windows. It’s cute, even though it’s designed to ensure Keoghan yells “Squarespace!” every few seconds.
No 6: The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism
Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady trade insults for 15 seconds, spitting out generic reasons for hating each other. Their celebrity is a distraction from the message about tolerance, but when Snoop, now himself, says, “I hate that things are so bad that we have to do a commercial about it,” it still hits home.
No 7: HexClad
Gordon Ramsay is recruited to cook for a visiting extraterrestrial played by Pete Davidson. The scenario is clever, though the Ramsay-to-Davidson ratio is exactly the opposite of what you would want.
No 8: He Gets Us
A series of lovely images of despair and connection, set to Johnny Cash’s rendition of “Personal Jesus”. How it illustrates the tagline “Jesus showed us what greatness really is” will not necessarily be clear to all viewers, but presumably IYKYK.
No 9: Ritz
Noted grumps Aubrey Plaza and Michael Shannon show off their saltiness, because Ritz crackers are salty. (Bad Bunny drops by, for the sake of variety.) It’s more intelligible than most of the one-joke ads, and Plaza and Shannon are a good pair.
No 10: Science Moms
The likely progress of climate change is charted along the timeline of a newborn girl’s life. A little clunky and sanctimonious in its execution but unimpeachable in its sentiments.
No 11: Google
The national ad for Google’s Gemini personal assistant is likely to be the most slickly handsome production in the field. If the use of Capra-esque family moments to humanise an AI-generated voice that coaches a dad for a job interview completely creeps you out, however, feel free to move this to the bottom of the list.
No 12: Doritos
Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norell, winners of a $1 million contest, created an ad with something most of the agencies don’t seem interested in: a story. It’s nebulous – an alien tries very hard to wrestle a bag of Doritos away from its human owner – but it’s there.
No 13: Homes.com
One of the better executions of a paper-thin comic idea (not being able to say “Homes.com is best” on the air), ending with that most welcome of famous pitchmen, Morgan Freeman. A second ad wasn’t as clever but had even more Freeman.
No 14: Novartis
The Swiss pharmaceutical company calls a reverse: 40 seconds of images of women’s breasts, ranging from silly to stereotypically provocative, are followed by a sober pitch for more attention to breast-cancer screening. Cancer survivor Wanda Sykes stars in the ad without male help, a rare accomplishment for a female celebrity this year.
No 15: On
Roger Federer and “Sesame Street” puppet Elmo debate the spelling of the logo on Federer’s shoes. There’s barely even a coherent thought here, but come on, it’s Roger Federer and Elmo.
No 16: Poppi
Appealing performances by a trio of influencers in an ode to indecision. Who knew that choosing a soda could be so anxiety-inducing?
No 17: Pfizer
A small boy puts on the gloves for big pharma, figuratively boxing his way through cancer with the presumptive help (not shown) of Pfizer drugs. Stirring in a not particularly moving way, perhaps because the focus is on celebration rather than on the fight.
No 18: National Football League
In a “Ferris Bueller”-vintage high school scenario, the girl jocks kick the behinds of the boy jocks on the football field, leading to a plug for girls’ flag football as a varsity sport. Well choreographed, with some action-exploitation energy, but it feels innocuous in a world with a President Donald Trump executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”.
No 19: STōK
Channing Tatum teaches the actual players of the Wrexham soccer club in Wales – subject of the series “Welcome to Wrexham” – how to do celebration dances. It’s always fun to watch Tatum move, though on the evidence of this and any number of movies, there is no one left on earth who knows how to film someone dancing.
No 20: Rocket
The ad itself – a montage of homecoming scenes set to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” – was very pretty. The kicker, in which the screen cut to the stadium for what was supposed to be a live singalong by the crowd, was exactly the anticlimax the online home-finance company should have known it would be.
No 21: Michelob Ultra
Casting Catherine O’Hara and Willem Dafoe as pickleball hustlers playing for beer is a nice idea, but it goes on for too long.
No 22: Nerds
Shaboozey, riding the wave from “A Bar Song” and his guest appearances on “Cowboy Carter,” sings “What a Wonderful World” backed by a gigantic, red, trumpet-playing gummy in a slight but pleasant and colourful spot.
No 23: Tubi
The slightly surreal premise – that your preferences in streaming content will be coded into your DNA (and reflected in your anatomy) – works better than you’d expect. The mother’s “What if Westerns aren’t hot when he grows up?” is one of the day’s better lines.
No 24: DoorDash
The presence of always-engaging comedian Nate Bargatze elevates this otherwise indifferent (but frenetic) spot, in which he uses the money he saves on deliveries to clone himself.
No 25: Bosch
Antonio Banderas is totally in on the joke, and he’s fun to watch as he’s transformed by the glory of his Bosch refrigerator. The appliance and tool company loses points, however, for the odd decision to pair Banderas with an actor playing wrestler Randy Savage, who died in 2011.
No 26: Häagen-Dazs
Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez, in a cool car on a coastal highway, slow down to enjoy ice cream bars to the sweet sound of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’”. The play on their “Fast and Furious” personas is negligible but nice to look at.
No 27: Budweiser
Will the young men who drive beer sales respond to the soft, nostalgic pull of a Clydesdale nosing a keg across the countryside to the sound of the Bellamy Brothers? It’s a sobering thought. The horse is awfully cute, though.
No 28: TurboTax
Issa Rae’s indestructible likability graces a series of mild sight gags about the irritations of tax season.
No 29: Duracell
Tom Brady’s batteries run down – he’s a robot, nudge, nudge – in a mildly amusing spot with a self-effacing, brand-reinforcing reference to the Brady roast.
No 30: Ram Trucks
A fairy tale is remade as a comic blockbuster, with the ubiquitous Glen Powell – whose anodyne charm is apparently perfect for the current moment – in the role of Goldilocks, with pickup trucks instead of porridge.
No 31: FanDuel
The company’s annual field-goal-kicking competition is awkward and humdrum, but this year’s edition reinforced the fact that Eli Manning is one of our most endearing sports personalities.
No 32: Skechers
Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, is a more natural pitchman than you might expect. He also seems to be aware that the ad, in which he’s cast as a part-time hand model to sell slip-on shoes, makes no sense at all.
No 33: WeatherTech
To the sound of “Born to Be Wild,” four women of grandmotherly age pile into a convertible and partake in strenuous and mildly racy antics. It all feels a little out of proportion to what’s being sold, which are floor mats.
No 34: Pepsi
The soft-drink brand revives the Pepsi Challenge, pitting zero-sugar colas against one another, with a resolutely utilitarian announcement that has the nice touch of focusing on (what looks like) a 50-year-old TV set.
No 35: Coors Light
Human-sized sloths move, very slowly, through their routines at the office, the gym and other places on the Monday after the Super Bowl. That a case of Coors Light is the appropriate accompaniment for their dazed state seems like a mixed message at best.
No 36: Hellmann’s
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunite at Katz’s Delicatessen so she can fake another orgasm, this time inspired by mayonnaise. Crystal’s reactions are seamless, but the punchline doesn’t deliver.
No 37: Dunkin’
“We should have paid for Matt” Damon, Casey Affleck tells his brother, Ben, and never has a commercial more accurately summed up its own irrelevance. At least viewers of the game didn’t have to sit through the endless Jeremy Strong-as-Paul Revere gag. For that, seek out the seven-minute version online.
No 38: NerdWallet
A high-IQ beluga whale with Kieran Culkin’s voice retrieves a klutzy human’s cellphone. The message appears to be that we are a hapless species wholly dependent on the internet, and who can argue?
No 39: Little Caesars Pizza
The pizza chain sells Crazy Puffs. Eugene Levy has crazy eyebrows. Done!
No 40: YouTube TV
The difficulties of watching live sports through the millennia – back through the Colosseum to the truly captive audiences in caves – are solved by the internet. A little more formulaic than you’d expect from a tech titan.
No 41: Meta
A Chris, a Chris and a Kris (Hemsworth, Pratt and Jenner) plug the tech giant’s AI-assisted Ray-Ban sunglasses. This pair of intermittently amusing spots sends the reassuring message that contemporary art is just there to be made fun of, with all the wit and grace you would expect from a tech giant.
No 42: Lay’s
A young farm girl, left behind when everyone else heads to the field, plants and tends an equally forlorn potato. The aw factor is very high; the sudden pivot at the end into a public service announcement for family farms is jarring.
No 43: T-Mobile
A pedestrian pitch for the comprehensiveness of the carrier’s coverage in tandem with Elon Musk’s satellite service Starlink. But the closing offer of several months of free service for its rivals' customers caught your eye.
No 44: Uber Eats
One of two overthought ads featuring Matthew McConaughey (see also Salesforce, below). The cameos by Kevin Bacon, Greta Gerwig and Martha Stewart are nice, but is this the best time to be making jokes about conspiracy theories?
No 45: Fetch
It looks like it was shot for $1.99, but it’s admirably straightforward: download the “rewards” app Fetch right now for a chance to win $10,000 a minute from now. What could go wrong, besides a lifetime of unwanted texts?
No 46: Salesforce
McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are the attractions in a pair of ads for artificial intelligence booking services. The one involving outdoor restaurant seating and rain is forced and laugh-free; the one with McConaughey rushing through Heathrow Airport is worth a chuckle or two.
No 47: GoDaddy
Much-loved actor Walton Goggins, at the risk of making himself slightly less loved, shills for GoDaddy’s business-creation tool Airo in an overly busy spot that also ends up being a plug for his own Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses.
No 48: Dove
This public-service spot from the seller of soaps and other personal-care items shows an adorable 3-year-old girl running down a sidewalk, then puts up a title saying that when she’s 14, she will hate her legs. The message about positive body images never quite comes through.
No 49: Instacart
This spot depicts grocery delivery as a stampede, with familiar brand mascots – a doughboy chef, a green giant, a grinning pitcher – racing across the landscape to arrive together on a homeowner’s doorstep. Seems like a recipe for breakage.
No 50: Pringles
If you’re not aware that the face on the Pringles logo has a moustache, then this high-concept spot – with its flying celebrity moustaches winging their way to the store to get more chips – will be more than a little bewildering.
No 51: Bud Light
Comedian Shane Gillis and rapper Post Malone star in a deadpan ode to suburban backyard partying, with cultural undertones and overtones that defy simple analysis. Peyton Manning drops by to lend folksy gravitas.
No 52: MSC Cruises
Drew Barrymore and Orlando Bloom trade shipboard cliches about America populism and European snobbery. As tiring as, for some of us, the idea of a cruise.
No 53: Liquid Death
Even with the reassurance at the end of the ad that the product is non-alcoholic, it’s still disconcerting to watch drivers and police officers chugging out of aluminium cans as if drinking on the job.
No 54: Booking.com
The reservation service promotes its “something for everyone” promise with a scattered montage of hotel mishaps that isn’t likely to appeal to anyone in particular. Various Muppets make cameo appearances.
No 55: Taco Bell
The fast-food restaurant celebrates its “rando” noncelebrity customers while also managing to squeeze in LeBron James and Doja Cat. No one thought outside the bun.
No 56: Jeep
Harrison Ford turns to the camera in a “Yellowstone”-style Western manner and your hopes are high. Then he starts reciting a lengthy string of drivel about freedom, while footage of Americans in battle shows what we’ve gone through so that we can be happy in our Jeeps.
No 57: Mountain Dew Baja Blast
An animated seal with the face and voice of, yes, Seal sings a parody of the performer’s 1994 hit “Kiss From a Rose”. It may induce nightmares, although you have to admit that, “My flippers can’t hold Mountain Dew, what a shame” makes about as much sense as, “And now that your rose is in bloom, a light hits the gloom on the grey”.
No 58: Disney+
Imagining the world without “Star Wars” or “The Simpsons” or “The Bear,” this bland spot for Disney’s streaming offerings might make you think, “Yeah, that wouldn’t be so bad”.
No 59: Cirkul
Adam DeVine of the “Pitch Perfect” movies accidentally orders 100,000 Cirkul water bottles, a gag that ties in to an actual giveaway said to be taking place during the Super Bowl. It’s hard to say which is more annoying: the ad or the notion of spending money on branded water bottles.
No 60: Coffee-Mate
Inspired by non-dairy whipped cream, a man’s tongue dances, assumes strange shapes and plays the chimes before leaving his mouth entirely. No wonder there’s a label warning against “deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents”.
No 61: Reese’s
Confused lovers of the company’s “chocolate lava” candy try to eat actual lava. It’s a head-scratcher.
No 62: Totino’s Pizza Rolls
Would you base your campaign for frozen pizza snacks on an animated alien who looks like the walking personification of heartburn?
No 63: Angel Soft
An animated junior angel gives us 30 seconds to go to the bathroom and then wonders why we haven’t gone. Apparently angels are quicker.
No 64: Hims & Hers
The telehealth company’s plug for its weight-loss services takes the form of a jangly attack on big pharma and corporate medicine. Confusing, unsettling and unconvincing.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Mike Hale
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