Super Bowl LIX: What Eight Million Dollars Buys You Now

The game was a blowout by halftime, which means the ads had the biggest captive audience of the year with nothing else to hold it. Eight million dollars for thirty seconds, before you spend a dollar on production or a dime on the celebrity. So, as we do every February, the campaigns team gathered around too much pizza and graded the most expensive media night in the world. General notes, some grumpy, some admiring.

Celebrity is now the default, which means it is now wallpaper

The dominant strategy this year was stacking famous faces and hoping charisma does the positioning work. Some of it was executed well. Most of it was interchangeable: swap the celebrity, swap the brand, and would anyone notice? When everyone buys the same insurance policy against being boring, the policy stops paying out.

The spots that worked used fame as an ingredient, not a substitute. Harrison Ford talking quietly about freedom for Jeep worked because the person meant something in that context. The lesson is old but apparently needs annual repeating: a celebrity should be an argument, not a decoration.

AI bought its first ticket

OpenAI's first Super Bowl spot was the night's most interesting strategic move, and I say that about the strategy, not the film. Placing ChatGPT in a lineage of human invention, rendered in dot-matrix pointillism, was a deliberate attempt to feel inevitable and calm at the moment the public conversation about AI is anything but. Meanwhile other tech brands played AI for laughs or for fear.

What strikes me is that AI appeared in the ads the way the internet appeared in Super Bowl ads circa 1999: as the subject. Within a few years it will just be the substrate and nobody will mention it. The brands that win that transition will be the ones that stop advertising the technology and start advertising what it feels like to live with it.

Nike remembered it has a voice

After a long Super Bowl absence, Nike showed up with "So Win," a black-and-white anthem for women athletes with actual conviction in the writing and the edit. You can debate the business context that pushed them back to big brand advertising. You cannot debate that the spot had a point of view, and on a night of hedged bets, conviction cuts through like a siren.

That is the pattern we keep tracking year after year: the top of the USA Today ad meter and the bottom are usually both safe. The spots people remember in June are almost always the ones a nervous committee would have killed.

What we tell clients who will never buy this game

None of our clients is spending eight million on a spot, and that is fine, because the strategic lessons scale down cleanly:

• One idea per film. The failed spots tried to do brand relaunch, product demo, and comedy in thirty seconds. Pick one.
• Sound off still matters, but sound on is back. The best writing this year was writing, not captions on stock footage.
• The teaser industrial complex is exhausted. Teasers for trailers for ads spend your novelty before the moment. Save something for the night.
• Distinctiveness compounds. The brands that felt instantly recognizable in two seconds have been building those codes for years. That is the real media buy.

Final grade for the year: C+ on average, with three or four genuine A performances. Expensive wallpaper is still wallpaper. Next year, more spine, please.