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Last year, the Super Bowl emanated from the eye of the vibe shift. Donald Trump had just scored his first popular-vote victory, remaking American consensus, and brands far and wide scrambled to meet the tastes of a newly MAGAfied polity. In practice, that mostly resulted in a revival of obnoxious early-2000s machismo—girls in bikinis, Shane Gillis, dewy-eyed tributes to the heartland, and so on. It was a bleak enterprise. Generally speaking, when Harrison Ford is using a Jeep commercial to forward the idea that Republicans and Democrats aren’t so different after all, there’s a good chance the national spirit is ebbing to an all-time low.
Well, it turns out, the conservative cultural paramountcy was hilariously short-lived. Trump’s approval rating bottomed out in the months after the inauguration, and currently it’s hovering in the mid-30s. Amid the rebuke, brands have recoiled back within the antiseptic neutrality where they’re most comfortable: irrelevant celebrity cameos, cheap millennial nostalgia, unmoored wistfulness for simpler days. Given that it is 2026, those efforts were put forth in service of A.I. and bloodless tech platforms. Didn’t we use to make things in this country?
Let’s get to this, the best and worst ads of the night:
Squarespace is the venue for the latest collaboration between Emma Stone and auteur director Yorgos Lanthimos. I take that as proof that the web-hosting company—which you usually hear about during podcast advertisement breaks—has accrued more juice than I could ever have imagined. It turns out when you hand the car keys to a guy like Lanthimos, he is going to direct a commercial that assumes that a vast cross-section of Americans are familiar with the tropes of Bergman-tinged melodrama. With all that said, a bonfire composed of burning laptops is a good summation of 2026’s current flavor of anxiety.
Lanthimos actually has two commercials this Super Bowl cycle. This one is more cut-and-dry. A handsome George Clooney tells a table of malcontents that Grubhub delivery orders are no longer going to be encumbered with miscellaneous fees, which is huge news for the growing number of Americans who, seemingly, do not know how to cook. Seriously, what is Lanthimos up to? These ads better be bankrolling the most distressing movie ever made.
Bowen Yang is in a huge number of commercials these days, and every time I see him, I get a little more bummed out. Here he is for Ritz, alongside Jon Hamm and Scarlett Johansson, letting a couple of dead-on-arrival punch lines fly. We need to save some of these SNL expats, man. Let Yang make a George Santos movie!
The considerable talents of Shane Gillis are once again leveraged for a vacuous Bud Light commercial, which is very much in line with the company’s ongoing flirtation with the MAGA-voting public. (Remember when conservatives were furious at Budweiser? That feels like approximately 1,000 years ago.) Gillis is legitimately funny, and I wish he’d play against type more often. On the other hand, I would be okay with never seeing Post Malone on my television ever again.
Andy Cohen’s Nerds ad is reminiscent of a more sensible time, where celebrities of a certain class—read: people who are not movie stars—popped up in Super Bowl commercials. I do not need George Clooney or Emma Stone to inform me that there is now a larger kind of Nerds Gummy Clusters on the market, but the guy who goes toe-to-toe with Dorinda Medley is a perfect fit.
Xfinity saves Jurassic Park from destruction by simply turning a router back on, preventing a cataclysmic security breakdown. What follows is an alternate version of the film where nothing goes wrong, and nobody gets eaten by velociraptors. Those who grew up with the film will be struck by the distinct mid-’90s film grain dusted onto Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, both of whom have been uncannily de-aged. I like the ad, and I’m chilled to the bone by the technology. I guess that’s what it feels like to be alive these days?
There is a strange, refractive moment at the end of this Fanatics commercial where Kendall Jenner bets on the New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl. But, apparently because Fanatics doesn’t have the requisite licensing privileges, instead what appears on her phone are the words “NEW ENGLAND” inscribed under a generic helmet. It sums up the overall texture of the sports-betting boom. There is money everywhere, and yet everything still feels like a scam.
Svedka has the dubious honor of producing the most evidently A.I.-generated commercial of the year. The vodka brand asked the machines to create some dancing robots for them, who move with all the grace of the Crazy Frog. It’s the most egregious example of viral-baiting I’ve seen tonight. A 30-second spot at the Super Bowl goes for $8 million these days. Can you guys please hire an actor?
There is a scene in this Sabrina Carpenter Pringles ad where she constructs a man entirely out of potato chips, and canoodles with him between the sheets, ostensibly after some mind-blowing sex. It kinda gives new meaning to the phrase “Once you pop, you just can’t stop.”
Our second potato-chip ad comes from Lay’s, and it takes a much different approach. A father and daughter sit on a potato farm, reflecting on a generation’s worth of successful harvests in service of the Lay’s corporation, while a weepy cover of Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know” plays in the background. (The dad is about to retire. He’s handing off the farm to his kid.) You know what gets me to the snack aisle? Good old-fashioned emotional terrorism.
Here is the exact same fucking ad, this time by way of Toyota. Fathers and sons around this great nation are bonding over Rav4s, a car most of us are familiar with from when we try to save as much money as possible while standing at the Hertz rental desk.
If you are moved by a Budweiser Clydesdale ad in 2026, you officially qualify for AARP.
Kurt Russell has never drunk a Michelob Ultra. I simply refuse to believe it.
I found myself irrationally angry about the way T-Mobile convinced the Backstreet Boys to parody “I Want It That Way” with facile sloganeering. (One sample lyric: “Tell me why / It’s America’s best network.”) I guess that means I harbor some improper feelings about the sanctity of the Backstreet Boys catalog. The joke is on me!
Similarly, when the Coinbase logo popped up at the end of this Backstreet Boys ad everyone at my party booed.
I have the same issue with this State Farm ad, which does not feature Jon Bon Jovi, but does let Keegan-Michael Key play a hammy, Reddit-y cover of “Livin’ on a Prayer”—a song near and dear to my heart. I guess I should never grow to value any popular music, because it will always become contaminated by the Super Bowl.
As someone who enjoyed The Brutalist, and was subsequently horrified by Adrien Brody’s Academy Awards acceptance speech—perhaps the single greatest documentation of overwrought Actor Brain ever broadcast live—I do appreciate the way Turbo Tax takes the piss. Brody is materially correct that any honest commercial about a tax service ought to reflect the misery of an early-April weekend paging through illegible municipal directives, and it’s legitimately funny that this is the first project he’s taken on since the Oscar win. Maybe he does get it, after all.
This Manscaped ad ends with a dude flushing his recently shaved chest hair down the toilet, immediately making the company a sworn enemy of plumbers and landlords nationwide.
Ring is one of the most evil companies in the world. Here, it justifies the creation of a dystopian, paranoid police state because it will make it easier to find someone’s lost dog. Sounds great. Put the entire neighborhood under constant surveillance so your stupid Labrador can find its way home.
That’s right, baby. We’ve got GLP-1 commercials at the Super Bowl. The brand here is Wegovy, and the runtime drags longer than the other ads here. That’s because after DJ Khaled and Kenan Thompson extol the virtues of this miracle drug, a voiceover recounts a litany of potential side effects—vomiting, diarrhea, kidney problems, things of that nature. Here’s to a lifetime of dopamine modulation, I guess. We are through the looking glass now.
Wix is here to make the case that anyone can code now with the unlimited power of A.I., so long as you’re able to write a prompt. In the commercial a woman uses it to design a website for her furniture refurbishment company, which, given the advent of Grok, is the least nefarious possibility one could wield with such a capacity.
Rob Gronkowski, George Kittle, and Greg Olsen are tight ends, a pass-catching position in football. The term “tight end” is also a wondrously pliable euphemism. Naturally, the pharmaceutical company Novartis is using these tight ends for a commercial about prostate cancer screenings. Do you get it? We’re talking about butts.
Levi’s also has a butt-centric commercial, this one starring Megan Thee Stallion, which I will not be commenting on further because I do not want to get divorced.
I said last year that I didn’t really know what Instacart does. I still don’t know, and I’m less keen to find out now that the brand has tied its cart to the milquetoast Benson Boone—who must be absolutely steaming about how quickly Alex Warren has stolen his thunder in the ongoing youth group–ification of the Billboard charts. The company gets good mileage out of Boone’s trademark backflip here, but yeah—goodbye forever, dude!
I have enjoyed the caustic verve of this Claude.ai promotional campaign, which seems to be heading off the inevitable swoon of the A.I. revolution before it firmly takes hold. The basic principle is that, with time, ChatGPT is going to start handing out sponsored brand recommendations in its feedback—while Claude will never do such a thing. It feels a little bit like Skynet giving us a heads-up before incinerating the atmosphere, but I’ll take it.
He Gets Us has been running these strange, Jesus-themed commercials for multiple Super Bowls in a row now, and they’re only getting more contrived. This time around, we follow a bunch of young people having a blast—snapping selfies, gambling in Vegas, cutting together an awesome DJ mix—only to be lectured that anhedonic stasis is the only way to Feel God. Hilariously, it makes this case by jump-cutting to a woman on a very expensive-looking hike through the Rocky Mountains or something. Leave me alone, man!
The thesis of this Kinder Bueno ad seems to be that aliens have not yet destroyed Earth because chocolate and hazelnut go really well together. I’m pretty sure this also happens in Arrival.
A polar bear suffers through an existential crisis of faith after realizing that he prefers Pepsi Max to Coke Zero. This would, perhaps, be more effective if Pepsi made the bold case that Diet Pepsi is better than Diet Coke, but even in the hyperreality of the Super Bowl commercial slate, one can only bend the truth so far.
Dunkin’ Donuts comes through with a legitimately well-executed tandem of random mid-’90s sitcom references (Jennifer Aniston shows up with the Rachel haircut) and Boston superiority (Tom Brady is presented as a Chad). It’s good!
MrBeast is shilling for Salesforce, a collaboration that previously ran during the Winter Olympics. In the ad he seems to stand astride the world, a 2010s Michael Bay–style epic zoom-out to space revealing the global reach of both his vacant stare and the Salesforce CRM. I will spend 72 hours in a sensory deprivation tank eating nothing but Feastables if someone will just explain to me once and for all what Salesforce actually does.
