Super Bowl LX: What We Noticed From Down the Road

Super Bowl LX happened an hour down the road from our studio, which meant a week of clients in town, too many dinners, and the annual ritual of watching the most expensive thirty-second slots in advertising with a room full of people who make ads for a living. We are a harsh audience. Here is what Sunday's breaks actually told us.

Celebrity fatigue finally hit the wall

For years the safe Super Bowl play has been celebrity plus nostalgia plus a wink, and the room's reaction this year was telling: the format has stopped registering. When the fourth famous-face-doing-a-bit spot ran before halftime, someone at our party asked "wait, what was that for?" and nobody could answer. Eight figures of media, zero seconds of memory.

The spots that worked did something harder. They had an actual idea about the product. The best work of the night, and the room was near-unanimous, came from brands that trusted a single sharp thought delivered with craft: real cinematography, real writing, endings that landed instead of dissolving into logo soup. Craft read as confidence. Confidence read as worth buying.

The AI spots split into two species

This was the first Super Bowl where AI showed up on both sides of the camera and in the scripts, and the split was stark.

• Brands that used AI as subject matter mostly embarrassed themselves. The jokes were already stale, and the earnest "AI will change everything" anthem spots felt like 2024 conference keynotes with a media budget.
• Brands that used AI as a production material, invisibly, in service of an idea, did fine, because nobody was thinking about the toolchain. Which is the point.

The lesson we keep repeating to clients: nobody buys your product because of how you made the ad. The making is our problem. The feeling is the deliverable.

One worrying trend: the sameness problem

Here is the note that matters beyond one Sunday. A striking number of spots this year shared a visual grammar: the same lush hyperreal gloss, the same drifting camera moves, the same color science. Different brands, different categories, same dream. You could feel the shared toolchain underneath.

This is the sameness problem we have been warning about for a year, now playing at maximum cultural volume. When production capability is evenly distributed, distinctiveness has to come from somewhere upstream: a stranger idea, a specific voice, a visual world that costs real taste to build. The brands that looked like themselves on Sunday, unmistakably, in the first two seconds, got a competitive gift from everyone who looked like the default.

What this means if you are planning 2026 work

A few takeaways we are carrying into our own campaign work this spring, with a World Cup summer looming over every media plan in North America.

• Buy fewer, better. The mid-tier spot is dead. If you cannot afford to be crafted, be small and sharp instead. The middle is invisible.
• Distinctive assets are appreciating. Sound, voice, recurring characters, a color you own. The spots people could name-check on Monday all had them.
• Live moments still concentrate attention like nothing else. The game delivered the one thing the fragmented ecosystem cannot: a hundred million people feeling the same thing at the same time. June's tournament will do it again, for a month, across three countries. Plan accordingly.

We left the weekend oddly encouraged. The tools got cheap, the gloss got universal, and the result is that ideas and taste are carrying more of the load than they have in a decade. That is a market we like.