Super Bowl. The greatest day in the calendar for Advertising. It's an embarrassment of riches, promotional excess and big bets. It’s glorious.
My second favourite thing after the great Football Advertising Party is reading and writing all about it. The hot takes. The bold claims. The annual flurry of loosely qualified assertions about how the landscape has forever changed. We in advertising never waste a good opportunity to declare a turning point. Naturally, we gorged ourselves. And although I might just be getting a bit older, both Caro and I couldn’t help but notice this one felt a little less sparkly.
Back on home soil, Caro was watching with equal parts ad-nerd enthusiasm and Patriots-induced heartbreak. Her read was immediate: the game felt a bit flat. And so did some of the ads. The sparkle was missing.
Not all of it, of course. There were proper bright spots.
Liquid IV leaning into a hydration truth most of us have quietly validated with a sideways glance. I suspect very few AI tools would confidently surface that particular insight if prompted. Kellogg’s William Shat Raisin Bran fibre reveal. Annoying, until it clicked. Then genuinely smart. Novartis weaving tight ends into preventative screening with surprising elegance.
Bathroom humour. Fibre jokes. Locker room puns. Juvenile? Slightly. Human? Completely. And maybe that is the point. Because the human bits cut through.
But let's talk about the very well-paid elephant in the room. Celebrities.
This reached a fever pitch last year and although their inclusion is down from 68% of all ads to 62%, it’s clear brands are still hedging risk and distinctive efforts with these folk. There’s nuance here. We can probably expect the number to keep falling. Others have addressed the issue more comprehensively. But the rule I was taught (and still try to stick to) is simple: fame is a byproduct, not a strategy.
Caro put it more bluntly: “if the idea only works because the celebrity is famous, it’s not an idea. It’s insurance.”
Insurance isn’t inherently bad. Insurance can feel safe. But safe rarely makes history.
And speaking of safe… Let’s talk about the other buzzword of the night, besides “field goal.” AI.
Interestingly, there may not have been a huge amount of AI used in the ads themselves (beyond Svedka, who at least admitted it). But there were certainly a lot of ads for AI. If Caro’s tracking is correct, we saw:
Anthropic: their first ever Super Bowl spot, clearly differentiating itself in the LLM race.
OpenAI: a 60 national Codex spot, plus regional ads showcasing small businesses leveraging ChatGPT.
Google Gemini.
Microsoft Copilot.
Amazon (Ring and Alexa. Framed as helpful, but among Caro’s watch party crowd, more than a few felt “creepy”).
Genspark, which sparked a different kind of room reaction: “Is this taking my job?”
Salesforce promoting Slack AI.
ai.com, which left many wondering what, exactly, it does.
From our vantage point at a scrappy AI company from Down Under, it was fascinating to watch the category openly confront itself on the biggest stage in culture. It is a competition, after all. And although many in our space are still learning how to “Super Bowl” (present company included), the open confrontation across tech and beyond was refreshing.
At the risk of alienating the EBI crowd, acknowledging your competition doesn’t simply donate attention to the category leader. Positioning still matters.
While I admired the spirit of Anthropic’s work, it reminded us of something Reed Hastings once said about Netflix: “No advertising coming to Netflix. Period.” Less than two years later, that position shifted. As the major players in AI fight to become the homepage of the internet, there are probably lessons to be learned from the streaming wars.
So yes. A few observations. A few trends. A few stats. But so what? Risk is so what.
Risk underpins every great Super Bowl ad in history. Every great campaign. The work we still talk about didn’t come from playing it safe. It came from someone taking a calculated leap. This year, outside of a few friendly swipes, felt more than a bit cautious. One of the more frustrating paradigms in Advertising is the idea of maths versus magic (as though we have to choose between data and creativity). Realistically, you need both. It’s a false dichotomy.
Magic i.e. creativity is, fortunately, much more difficult to train a language model on. It’s an innately human pursuit that the machines we’re currently enamoured by aren’t very good at on their own. They recognise patterns and desperately avoid risk. There is an answer to this, or at the very least, a wealth of inspiration.
If you want to see something risky, have a look at our Super Bowl spot. Apologies, experiment (for many reasons, most of which are legal). And if you have an appetite for risky work, please reach out - so do we.
We’ve built something that inspires you to find the risks worth taking.
The kind we both kept wishing we’d seen more of this year.
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