I've said this before, but back in the days when the Super Bowl was often a pretty lousy game, "I just watch for the ads" became a common joke. However, we've now gone from a time in the 80s and 90s when you had maybe only one or two really good games in a decade to a time when you really only have one or two BAD games in a decade. (To wit: between the 1983 and 1994 seasons, only two games were decided by less than two touchdowns. Between the 2010 season and this year, only three games were decided by more than 11 points, and at least as many - including this year's dramatic overtime finish - were fully in the balance right at the end of the fourth quarter.)
The 2024 Super Bowl started slow, but ultimately it was an incredibly exciting game in the fourth quarter and overtime, which is all I really demand of a football game. The ads, meanwhile, seem to get more boring every year. It's almost straight boilerplate now - grab a famous person, stick them in an office or in front of a green screen, have them make a few semi-jokes that are not in any way actually funny, and you're good to go. For as much as these ad slots cost, you'd think companies would want to put in a little more effort, but it seems like it's the exact opposite. If we're spending ten million dollars or whatever, there's no point in taking a risk on a clever idea. Just get someone recognizable so people will think, "Ah yes! I want a Michelob Ultra, as it is a beer beloved by Lionel Messi, Jason Sudeikis, and Dan Marino!"
With that said, let's hand out some awards.
The Apple 1984 Memorial Award for Least Shitty Ad
If you can do basic math, you will note that this is the 40th anniversary of the famous Apple ad and while it remains indelible, I think you'd have to acknowledge both that Apple's ascension to ubiquitous tech hegemon makes it at least mildly ironic in hindsight and that the extent to which it was the birth of the "big game ad" craze has turned out to be pretty annoying. Perhaps surprisingly, Apple itself did not appear least night. Neither did many even half-decent ads, making handing out this award something of a challenge. Ultimately, I think I liked this United ad the most:
"This is really an ad for something else" rug pulls can be annoying, but considering how seriously the NFL takes itself, it was amusing to see what looked like yet another up-its-own-ass NFL ad about the glory of fandom or whatever, only for the reveal to come that it was actually an ad about how United doesn't have change fees. Not the most original concept, but at least it wasn't hideously overdone.
Runner-Up: I ultimately couldn't pick the Dunkin' Donuts ad because building ads around celebrities is getting so tiresome, but it was easily the most effective of the "famous people trying to take the piss out of themselves" group. The BMW ad with the Christopher Walken impressions was kind of a funny idea, but it couldn't land the plane.
The Actual 1984 Award for Most Dystopian Ad
Congrats to UKG, a company I had never heard of before last night. Within seconds of their ad starting, I was already thinking of this award:
To be fair, it would have been way worse if this had been an ad specifically for Amazon or Walmart or something, which is what I was thinking when it first started. The version of the spot that actually appeared on the broadcast was only 30 seconds as I recall, but this ad is a failure at any length. For one thing, even after watching it I can't really tell you what UKG is or does. Something with timekeeping at work I guess. But also, the societal push to view work as a place where you have "the time of your life?" Oh yes, I owe it all to you, menial warehouse job! Fuck right off with that shit. To say nothing of how dystopian it is that you can have a corporation making enough money to advertise on the Super Bowl with the business model of "we make sure your employees adhere to a draconian punch-clock at all times."
Runner-Up: Microsoft, but we'll get to it.
Most Overproduced Ad
Frankly we might need to change this to Least Overproduced Ad just so there wouldn't be as many contenders to sift through every year. But there was a clear winner here: Bud Light.
If it were just this ad, with its inane concept and frenetic "just throw everything you can think of onscreen" execution, that would be bad enough. But what locked up the award here is the coordination with the actual broadcast - if you were watching the game, you saw that the end of this ad was followed by a return to the stadium, where the camera zoomed in on a suite featuring the characters from the ad. Jim Nantz even had to point them out. When you're so ingrained in the corporate bullshit of the NFL that you can coordinate a transition from your ad directly to the actual game, that is some serious overproduction. It's also just incredibly exhausting.
Runner-Up: I wrote down this Mountain Dew ad as soon as I saw it:
This actually has almost the exact same concept as the Mr. T Skechers ad, but at least "T is always in Skechers!" almost works as a joke. "I'm having a blast" is basically anti-comedy, and while the ad seems to be implicitly acknowledging that by casting the ultra-deadpan Aubrey Plaza, that doesn't make it funnier. The reason this falls under the Most Overproduced category instead of something like Worst Use of "Humor" is that they bothered to do so many different setups in service of a single joke that isn't even really a joke. Extra negative points for how bad the dragon part looks.
Cheapest Budget/Clumsiest Execution Award
I barely know what Temu is, but apparently it's some website that sells incredibly cheap crap:
I know animation isn't necessarily cheap, but this LOOKS cheap, and anyway the ad cannot possibly have cost much given how many times it ran during the game. Also I guess I know what they mean by "shop like a billionaire" but that's frankly just embarrassing given what has got to be the extremely low quality of anything you're buying for those kinds of prices.
Runner-Up: There were a few pretty cheap-looking ads but I guess I'll go with Snapchat here. This is actually a much more effective ad message-wise than the 30-second version that ran during the game (which I could only find on YouTube in the ever-unpopular someone-filming-their-TV format), so I'm more forgiving of its general aesthetic at this length, but the version that aired definitely deserves a mention for likely being pretty confusing to anyone who isn't already using Snapchat anyway.
Worst Use of "Humor" Award
In the Simpsons episode "Radioactive Man," there's an amusing gag where Rainier Wolfcastle - the show's Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-in - has difficulty parsing the character's punny catchphrase "Up and atom!" due to his stiltedly formal ESL status. Instead, he keeps saying "Up and at them!" despite the instructions of a frustrated dialect coach. This bit runs about ten seconds:
Now consider (a) the length of this State Farm ad and (b) that episode aired on September 24, 1995.
It's bad enough that this is the same joke - and once again, this is barely a joke - over and over for a solid minute. It also doesn't even really make sense. It's not like there's any confusion about what word Arnold is saying just because his accent doesn't hit the trailing R. So now it's just "tee-hee, foreign guy talk funny," which puts this ad squarely in the "Bood Light" camp of late 2000s xenophobia. I get that Arnold willingly participated, and if an A-list celebrity decides he wants to be in on the joke about his accent then fine, but that doesn't make it any funnier.
Runner-Up: Basically every other ad on the entire game could be tied for second here, but I'll do a special citation for the Drumstick ad because it's not 2008 and this would be stupid even if it were.
Flimsiest Pretense Award
I've noted in both of the last two years that this one has been getting increasingly difficult to hand out because "check out this hot babe" just isn't a hallmark of ads anymore. So I think we're going to have to discontinue it. As a replacement, since the downfall of "check out this hot babe" is a good trend, let's go with a bad trend:
The 84 Lumber Memorial Award for Most Political Bullshit
Remember in 2017 when 84 Lumber ran an ad that first seemed to be anti-border wall, and then turned out maybe to be pro-wall, and either way had fuck all to do with lumber? That's the namesake for this award, inspired by the problematic proliferation of religious and/or political ads during this game. (If you're thinking, "Hey, religion isn't political!" that's adorably naive.)
There's only one possible winner for this one: it's the RFK Jr. campaign ad, which I'm not going to embed or even link to here because fuck that guy. This would have been a terrible ad even if Kennedy himself weren't one of the worst assholes out there, but using an old 1960 John F. Kennedy jingle and trying to position yourself as the scion of the dynasty is especially dumb when virtually everyone else in the family has distanced themselves from his anti-vax bullshit. (Kennedy himself rather hilariously had to apologize to his family for this ad, which he claimed not to have any responsibility for, but you'll have to forgive me if I don't believe that a PAC endorsing Kennedy didn't even run the idea of a Super Bowl ad by his people in advance. Given that he has it pinned to his Twitter profile, I suspect he doesn't really feel that bad about it.)
If you didn't see it, the ad notably doesn't mention a single policy position or really anything at all beyond "Hey, someone named Kennedy seems to be running," and to be honest I'm not sure how old you would have to be for that to seem even remotely like an enticing proposition just on its face. 65 minimum? With the ludicrous conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would endorse Joe Biden from the championship podium after the game predictably failing to materialize, this was the only direct mention of presidential candidates during the game and I, for one, could very much have done without it.
Runner-Up: I just don't need Mark Wahlberg out there trying to push a Catholic prayer app and I really don't need him doing it with the corny-ass youth pastor line, "Stay prayed up." Stick to making Netflix movies no one is going to watch.
The Rick Dalton Award for the Most Egregious Use of B-List Celebrities
Once again this could go to nearly every ad, although there were even more candidates for the next award on the list than usual. At any rate, it's hard to look past CeraVe for this one:
I actually kind of enjoy this ad, which is executed amusingly. But the concept - hey, let's cash in on this actor's name being in our product name by having him pretend like he's trying to cash in on the fact that his name is in our product name - is just too much of a lock. It's especially egregious because when have you seen a CeraVe ad during a football game? This may have been aimed at the "watching for Taylor Swift" crowd but either way it feels like the only reason CeraVe even has a Super Bowl ad is that they thought of a justification for getting someone moderately famous to appear in it. At least things like Bud Light and Doritos would be running ads regardless.
Runner-Up: The Doritos ad with Jenna Ortega isn't incredibly terrible but just... why did it need to be Jenna Ortega when she barely even has anything to do? That's pretty much the definition of egregious.
The Jack Nicholson Award for the Most Egregious Use of A-List Celebrities
As I noted above, there were an awful lot of A-listers this year: Ben, Matt, and J-Lo; Arnold; Bradley Cooper; Christopher Walken; Beyonce. But when you really want to talk egregious, you need to enter the realm of the pointless cameo. And that gives us Scarlett Johansson:
There is simply no reason for ScarJo to be in this ad, especially as a still relatively young actress with exactly two Oscar nominations under her belt. She is miles away from being analogous to someone like Dan Marino or Bruce Smith, all-time great athletes whose careers were hampered by the lack of a championship. Was Charles Barkley not available? Was that too obvious? This is pure "we could get her and she's famous," nothing more. It's not like the jokes with her are even funny, although they're not any worse than the ad's bizarrely stupid concept in the first place.
Runner-Up: The Booking.com ad with Tina Fey might have skated except for the decision to toss Glenn Close in there for no apparent reason. (Is it some 30 Rock reference I don't get? Who cares?) Extra demerits for having Fey exclaim "Glenn Close??" This was an obnoxious trend this year - putting famous people in your ad and then not trusting the audience to know who they are. If I've said it once I've said it a hundred times: if the person is famous enough to be a key part of your ad, you shouldn't have to announce them. It's a hat on a hat, except that that term is usually used in relation to jokes and none of these things are actual jokes. (Also: if Glenn Close was willing to do a Super Bowl ad, shouldn't she have been in the ScarJo part? She actually is famous for having a very long career and repeatedly failing to win an Oscar! Maybe she wouldn't have wanted to do that, I guess, but it would have made so much more sense.)
The Bad Idea Jeans Award for Most Epic Miscalculation
This one doesn't go to a single ad, but rather to CBS itself for accepting an ad from the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and then also letting Kanye West run an ad for himself (which I'm not linking). Nothing says "we are definitely taking antisemitism seriously as a concept and not just using it as a cudgel to suppress criticism of Israel's military actions in Gaza" like simultaneously giving a platform to one of America's most famous antisemites.
Runner-Up: Duolingo's ad was weird and needlessly gross, and it also caused most of their app to crash into a "maintenance break" within a minute of airing.
The SkyMall Championship Trophy for Weirdest Attempt to Sell a Product
Gotta go with CrowdStrike here because when you are a company that most of the audience has never heard of, you should probably do an ad that makes it very clear what it is that you do.
Or, you could do that. I guess I have a basic sense of what CrowdStrike does - they stop breaches! - but hearing a little more about their services might have been a more effective ad for their product than seeing some shitty CGI robot thing get poofed into its cartoon boxer shorts.
Runner-Up: The Nerds Gummy Clusters ad is just kind of gross. And what is the overlap between the market for a children's candy product, or people who recognize TikTok influencer Addison Rae on sight (as you had better believe I did not), and people who recognize a Flashdance reference anyway?
Worst Super Bowl Ad of 2024
The issue with the ad for Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant or whatever the fuck exactly, isn't that the ad itself is actually a total train wreck. It's the pitch. We spend forever going through "people say I can't do X, I'll never do Y." Gosh, what could this product be that is going to facilitate this triumph of the human spirit we're building towards?
Oh, it's some AI bullshit that is going to do all the work for me, based on work that someone else already did. Someone said I don't have the talent to make art? I'll show them - by typing a prompt into a system that scrapes and reconfigures the work of actual artists! That definitely makes me a real artist myself and not just a talentless hack and AI-assisted plagiarist!
The 2022 Super Bowl was bombarded with ads for cryptocurrency, right at what turned out to be the peak of the crypto bubble. Two years later, NFTs are all but forgotten, one of the companies that advertised on that game collapsed and saw its founder go to jail, and crypto is largely back to being the niche interest it was before a few bigwigs thought they could ride it to infinite wealth. I'm holding out hope that the AI push during this year's game represents a similar crest of the wave - most uses of AI as they've been demonstrated to date are things that almost nobody wants or needs, and yet they're being pushed on us anyway. At least Google's ad touted the use of AI as an accessibility tool - also a more niche use, but a legitimate one. Microsoft suggesting its product can help you succeed by just doing all your work for you? First of all, if you know anything about these AI tools you know that they can't be relied on at all - there are the stories of AI-prepared legal briefs featuring made-up cases, the struggle of AI art creators to properly generate text or human fingers, and the fact that these tools are somehow getting WORSE at providing even the most basic information. (I wouldn't trust an AI assistant to properly quiz me on organic chemistry, as shown in the ad, for even a microsecond.) But beyond that, I'm unclear on who the wider market is for a tool like this. Who is the person who proclaims that they're going to change the world by... using a chatbot to write all their video game code for them? Make a shitty-looking animated movie that almost definitely is ripping off someone else's animated movie?
It's been said, but the grotesque irony is that the promise of AI has always been that it could automate jobs that were boring or unsafe for humans - and instead, the second it goes mainstream you have the capitalist class pushing its use as a replacement for legitimate artisans. Art, a distinctly human creation, has been reduced by these losers to a commodity that can and should be churned out mechanically by an automaton that has no soul and no true ideas or talent of its own. All it can do is process the work of actual human artists, synthesize and at best iterate on that, with no serious understanding of what it's producing beyond the binary knowledge that its output basically fits a descriptive prompt it was given. This is a bullshit future and we don't have to live in it. The sooner AI follows crypto down the mainstream garbage chute, the better.