Two Celebrities and a Product

Super Bowl spots are now too big to be memorable.

This year, a 30-second ad buy during the Super Bowl cost $8 million. Twenty years ago, it cost $2.4 million. That’s still not cheap, but it’s still a costly ticket simply to make it to air. Then you have to actually produce the ad, and no major company wants to spend more on the airtime than they did on the spot itself at the risk of looking cheap and desperate.

The outcome was a lot of ads that were pretty much the same thing: an average of two celebrities hocking a random product. There never seemed to be much rhyme or reason to it. You like Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara? Of course, you do! You’re not a monster. Here they are selling Michelob Ultra.

You know how Meta has a disturbing amount of power and no interest in your privacy? Well here are two famous Chrises (and Kris Jenner) selling you A.I. glasses that allow Meta to see everything you see.

The ads went on like this to various degrees of success. Rarely did the celebrity feel specifically chosen for a gag, as was the case with notoriously method actor Jeremy Strong literally getting into coffee for a Dunkin ad.

It would almost be laudable for the companies that eschewed celebrities for their products, but I can’t say they fared much better. ChatGPT tried to sell itself as the next great technological accomplishment without making an actual use case (where have I seen that before…).

Google fared a bit better by trying to pull at your heartstrings with a story of a father trying to get back into the workplace by having the Gemini AI assistant craft a resume or cover letter out of being a good dad (although it’s certainly perverse to see Google pitching that AI can get you a job while the company slashes thousands of its workers in favor of pursuing AI).

But with or without celebrities, what’s remarkable is how nothing stood out. For all the money spent on the airtime and ad creation, there’s nothing here that you’d rush to talk about or share with friends or co-workers. There’s no Terry Tate: Office Linebacker. Instead, we got two ads featuring flying facial hair (naturally featuring celebrities).

Some might say that these bland ads are no big deal. No one is watching live TV anyway, so when would you see them outside the Super Bowl? But these are the ads of at least the next six months. You’ll see abbreviated versions not only on live TV (especially during other sporting events), but also in your YouTube pre-rolls, your vertical video scrolls, and ad breaks if you’re using an ad-supported streamer.

And while I don’t want to handwring over the quality of advertisements, these do speak to a kind of cultural homogenization where no one dared to do anything interesting or distinctive. Perhaps there was too much money on the line. Perhaps once you demand a celebrity, there’s less creative wiggle room because you’re working off their affability and you just want to cut to “famous person likes X.” Or maybe it’s part of the larger media landscape where you need the shorthand of a celebrity to sell a product in a five- to 10-second pre-roll so here’s Ben Affleck, here’s Dunkin, go buy Dunkin.

Whatever the cause or causes may be, we’ve now arrived at a place where the commercials ended up being as forgettable as the game itself. Thank goodness for Kendrick Lamar.