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This year’s Super Bowl arrived in the eye of the national vibe shift. Donald Trump, you might remember, has won a second term in office. And there he was, saluting during the national anthem before the game, and the crowd wasn’t upset at all. MAGA-dom is ascendant, and not only that—for the first time since the inception of the movement, it’s arguably become culturally dominant.
Perhaps you recall the salad days of 2018, when companies like Airbnb and Smirnoff would leverage their advertising inventory against Trump, confident that those bets would pay off once the man was sufficiently humiliated or impeached. Those ideas aren’t making it out of the boardroom anymore. The president’s revenge has the vestiges of soft power running scared. Jeff Bezos is kissing the ring. Airbnb founders are endorsing RFK Jr. Carrie Underwood is singing at the inauguration. Travis Kelce, of all people, is saying nice things about Trump attending the Super Bowl.
So when the news came that Carl’s Jr. would be bringing back a lady in a bikini to sell burgers in a Super Bowl commercial—prompting instant headlines on Fox News—I half expected a thoroughly MAGA-fied commercial slate at the game, embodying a whiplash-inducing reversal of whatever the summer of 2020 was. Nobody went quite that far. Old Spice isn’t endorsing the end of DEI. McDonald’s isn’t introducing the Anti-Woke Special. But as a whole, the ads this year did possess a slight rightward sheen—or, at the very least, a renewed thirst for the Barstool dollar. What a strange world we live in. Let’s get to the ads: the best, the worst, and those I really wish I could erase from my brain.
Let’s just get it out of the way: Of course Carl’s Jr. has no problem aiming for the cheap seats. The company has long courted a vast group of men in this country who base their electoral decisions on an outmoded nostalgia for Spike TV and little else. So the company brought in Alix Earle, a classically attractive blond TikTokker, to wear a bikini and chow down on a gross-looking burger. It’s an obvious callback to the infamous—and, it should be said, much more effective—Paris Hilton commercial from 2005, in which she similarly ate a gross-looking burger while washing a car in a body-clinging black swimsuit. The ad gestures toward cheeky eroticism but comes off mostly as flat and dissociative—a context-free pair of tits, floating across your television. Look, man, I think we’ve all gotten a little exhausted by the relentless puritanism of the past decade or so. But if you are the sort of person who jerks off to hamburger commercials, I think you should lose the right to vote.
The girlies get their version of this too, with a Dodge commercial that centers on Glen Powell’s interpolation of Goldilocks and the Three Bears via a kind of bland bro-coded masculinity. Powell slays a dragon, he listens to Van Halen, he quotes William Wallace, and he carves a self-portrait out of a tree. America, or something like that. Make Powell slash USAID funding next.
Booking.com has enlisted the Muppets to get you to rent an all-inclusive in the Bahamas, and it scores some points for bringing on Statler and Waldorf as pitchmen. I do sort of wonder if everyone under the age of 25 will know Miss Piggy exclusively as the Puppet That Sells Things. But whatever. Given the competition, this was still kinda nice.
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Meanwhile, WeatherTech—a company that, as far as I can tell, sells protective padding for automobiles—has dropped a wild amount of money on a minutelong spot in which four seniors joyride across the great American heartland, pick up men, and eventually get arrested. So a Thelma & Louise thing? Maybe?
Coors Light, which really failed to detect the vibe shift and reintroduce its Hot Twins–centric promotional strategy, introduces us to a world of depressed sloths who can find the brightness in life only by drinking beer. In fact, Coors is apparently unveiling a limited-time brand of beer specifically designed for Mondays. The thinking seems to be: People are hungover after the Super Bowl and like sloth videos on the internet. OK!
I still don’t really understand what Instacart does, and judging by its ad—a Boschian Ready Player One–tinged mashup of ancillary consumer goods mascots like the Jolly Green Giant and Mr. Clean—maybe the company doesn’t either. Is the thing we’re supposed to glean here that in this new oligarchic order, mortal enemies like the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Quaker man have joined sides to plunder the subaltern? I don’t know, man.
“Kiss From a Rose” is a great song that has been unfortunately laundered in the language of cringe millennial memes over the past few years. And Mountain Dew—one of the clubhouse leaders in cringe millennial memes—has decided to cash in. It’s forced Seal to sing a much worse version of the song in which the lyrics are retrofitted to be about Baja Blast, a soft drink that contains 88 percent of your maximum daily allowance of sugar. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if the Super Bowl ultimately is a public humiliation ritual for people who were once slightly more famous than they are now.
Spruce has essentially the same game plan for its ad, except with the Baha Men. You see, rather than the woofs in the chorus, they say spruce. I’d like to think it took 30 people and, like, $400 million to figure that one out. I’m all for it. Keep cashing those checks, guys.
However, this year’s title holder for millennial cringemaxxing belongs to Pringles. It wasn’t even close. The chip company enlisted Nick Offerman—the most Reddit of all celebrities—to make some jokes about mustaches! Holy shit, dude, go ahead and tell me how awesome you think bacon is while you’re at it.
But truth be told, the commercial itself isn’t bad. I did enjoy how his mustache soared off his face and formed a carnivorous flock of other facial hair, à la The Birds.
The Pringles ad is especially funny because Little Caesars stepped up to the plate with a commercial centered on the hilarity of Eugene Levy’s bushy eyebrows. They also detach from his face and flutter through the air. Corporate espionage? Or just evidence of a tired, broken society that basically gave up on Super Bowl commercials more than a decade ago?
Matthew McConaughey stars in an Uber Eats spot, which reminds the world mostly of a happier time, when Matthew McConaughey was a movie star instead of … whatever the hell this is. (Charli XCX passes through as well, driving the final nail into the coffin of Brat Summer.) The conceit here is that the NFL has forever functioned as a capitalist psyop to sell more advertisements. Which, yes. Nailed it. We get the postironic commercials we deserve.
I feel the same way about the return of the Ben Affleck Dunkin’ Donuts tracksuit series, which men above the age of 50 really seem to like. Advertisers are going to be focusing a lot of attention on the Bill Simmons demographic over the next four years. The goal here appeared to be to jam as many unrelated celebrities into the same 90 seconds. Bill Belichick and that Druski guy the teens seem to like. It was nice to see Jeremy Strong, who hilariously plays off the perception of him as a no-fun dork on set. Is this the first time a viral New Yorker profile has been referenced in a Super Bowl ad? However, with his association with Affleck, I’m worried Strong is about to be sucked up into the Boston actor illuminati.
Dan Levy is also here, because of course he is. This time he’s shilling for Homes.com. If the 2028 Republican nominee runs on a platform banning all members of the Levy family from advertisements forever, I’m convinced they would get 80 percent of the vote.
Channing Tatum completed this quartet of white male washedness in the best way possible. He goes deep in his bag for some Magic Mike–era body-rolling acrobatics in service of some coffee brand called STōK, which I have to assume is sold exclusively at Ikea. Honestly, Tatum does a much better job catering to base-level horniness than Earle does—probably because he’s a professional actor rather than, you know, someone from TikTok.
Angel Soft might have the best commercial of the night, by doing absolutely nothing. It instructs the viewer to take the ad time to use the bathroom—and it was, conveniently, aired at the beginning of the halftime show. A public service! My only complaint is that I personally need a lot more than 30 seconds to do my business.
I guess Nate Bargatze is a nationally beloved celebrity in 2025? Not only does he headline a DoorDash ad, but it plays on the idea of him being the ultimate nonconfrontational regular-guy comedian by placing him in a garish Hollywood mansion. The American public is fluent not only in Bargatze but in Bargatze lore. Never say a perfectly decent, 7-outta-10 SNL sketch can’t deliver you fortune and glory.
I thought the same thing of Bud Light, which is tying its brand to Shane Gillis—another comedian who has become a household name out of nowhere and whose career might be the single best locus from which to understand the arc, and ultimately the defeat, of cancel culture. From a racist podcast moment to light beer—that, my friends, is the American dream in 2025. Gillis is cast next to Post Malone to remind everyone that we are in dire need of a national artistic reset.
A Duracell-powered Tom Brady is a really good idea for a commercial. Especially when you consider just how terrible he’s been at commentary this season.
Oh, and while we’re at it, Macho Man Randy Savage has been dead for more than a decade. So … why is Antonio Banderas interfacing with someone in Macho Man cosplay for a Bosch commercial? And not even a good Macho Man cosplayer at that? I know that professional wrestling isn’t high art, but that still seems pretty ghoulish to me!
On an even darker note, a dad uses his Google Pixel’s A.I. feature to talk about the joys of raising children, and somehow the severe dystopian motifs of this premise completely elide the company. He has no friends! He is talking to a machine about one of life’s greatest joys! He Googles “How to explain bullying to a child”! Insane.
There was also this thing, from OpenAI, which is not beating the Skynet allegations.
Using a slightly different depressing tack, T-Mobile announces a partnership with Elon Musk’s Starlink, without acknowledging the many questions all of us are left with.
But the dystopian tech nadir of the night had to be the collaboration between Ray-Ban and Meta on a pair of smart (?) glasses, which will absolutely become the hot MAGA accessory of the summer. The ad features Chris Pratt and Kris Jenner! They destroy a piece of modern art and once again fail to articulate any viable use case for A.I. as we currently understand it! It’s hard to understate how uncool the world has gotten.
Catherine O’Hara and Willem Dafoe star in a pickleball-centric Michelob Ultra ad in which they display crackling sexual chemistry while wrecking two younger players. I’d watch three hours of this. Luca, if you’re listening, this is your Challengers sequel.
Everything I’ve written can also be applied to MSC Cruises, which is adroitly trying to get people on its boats by following Orlando Bloom and Drew Barrymore as they enjoy a variety of vaguely cruise-related activities. The core appeal here, of both of them liking your vibe from across the bar, remains unsaid.
This rhymes perfectly with the Hellmann’s Mayonnaise spot, which is about as thirsty as the Super Bowl can get. I mean, it reunites Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in Katz’s Deli. Ryan squirts a healthy schmear of white, creamy mayo on a piece of rye bread and fakes an orgasm. In When Harry Met Sally, the two characters are making a point about the transactional nature of expressing pleasure, particularly in service to insecure men. Here, though, you’re left to think that the mayonnaise itself makes Sally come. Is this thing allowed to air in Texas?
No real notes here for Nike, which delivered an incredibly sick black-and-white sizzle reel of all its female athletes for the brand’s first Super Bowl ad in years. The ascendance of Caitlin Clark is something else.
I knew, from the first two seconds of a teary, Americana-tinged spot, that it had to belong to some sort of home-loan company. Was overjoyed when it was revealed to be Rocket Mortgage. Businesses like that always seem to think they’re competing for an Oscar with these commercials. Imagine interlacing clips of a baby taking a bath in a sink with “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Brother, you’re not Martin Scorsese. Just offer me a low-interest rate and leave.
There is a Ritz commercial here with Aubrey Plaza and Bad Bunny, whom I recognize, and some other vaguely recognizable famous guy, whom I very much don’t. This is the problem with the celebrity bloat that has overtaken our Super Bowl commercials. Seriously, who are all these people.
For an even more extraneous cinematic reference, Barry Keoghan reprises his role from The Banshees of Inisherin for Squarespace … a service that sells a domain-making tool. He rides a donkey around an impoverished Irish isle, chucking laptops at peasants. Brilliant stuff, guys. Cannot think of a commercial more salient to the palate of MAGA America. Next year, get Frances McDormand to do Nomadland.
I didn’t quite understand just how cooked the Fast & Furious franchise was until Häagen-Dazs booked Dom Toretto for an ice cream commercial. A real bummer. In a decade or so I might be forced to admit that most of those movies are bad. The final film in the series is set to be released next year, and at this rate it’s going to put up John Carter box-office numbers. Anyway, the point here is that Toretto doesn’t have to break the speed limit anymore, because he’s too busy enjoying an ice cream bar. Not a bad idea, but it loses points for pushing against the pro–drunk driving ferment apparent in the other Super Bowl ads.
But that’s better than what Busch Light has going on. It brought in Ross Chastain—a NASCAR driver—to hawk its beer. Trump has been back for less than a month, and the company’s already getting too big for its britches.
Jeep, meanwhile, goes for the unity dollar, enlisting Harrison Ford—who, at 82, appears to be more bookable than ever—to tell America that he’ll value anyone, no matter what race, nationality, or creed, so long as they drive a Jeep. It’s a car company gesturing at the vague idea of division, without having anything to say. Some things never change.
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