In one Super Bowl commercial, an octogenarian actor waxes lacrimal about freedom, a privilege bought for you with the blood of troops 80 years ago, a privilege whose outer bound and cleanest expression is the freedom to buy different kinds of trucks. A direct-to-consumer pharmacy vaguely refers to inadequacies in the healthcare system—inadequacies you allay by buying its products. The Fox network advertises a new show in which Americans live out post-apocalyptic survivalist fantasies in the woods while their families watch them experience pain and suffering, which they can end at the cost of pulling from the game and ending their chance of winning a cash prize. An artificial intelligence firm positions its core product as the logical endpoint (and end) of human evolution. Every single other ad asks, Do you remember these celebrities? Do you know that they're doing a Super Bowl ad for you right now? The unified message I took away from the ads was that the time of new ideas is receding, and society along with it. The theme was the soft acceptance of a comfortable death.
If you can learn anything of value from a year's crop of Super Bowl commercials, it is not in the products being sold to you, but rather in how they are being sold. Think of an advertisement as a mirror: The way that mirror reflects and distorts a vision of reality, a reality that can be confirmed or avoided by purchasing the correct product, tells you both what the advertiser sees as vital or interesting about culture and what they think you want to see.
The form is not by nature capable of novelty, though the theory of its utility is that advertising can reflect back deep-seated or unexamined aspects of culture in such a way that they feel novel. The immortal Apple 1984 ad did not so much make a point about authoritarianism as it shrewdly located its associated anxieties and sold computers against them. It is no coincidence that literally Sigmund Freud's nephew basically invented modern public relations, which is only arguably distinct from advertising on scale. Super Bowl ads are as expensive as they come and engender an uncanny reverence from the most marketed-to people on the planet, which makes them a useful, if not totally mind-shredding, cultural index.
So, if one were to extract a thesis on the state of culture in the United States based solely on the advertisements played on TV during the Super Bowl, the findings would be an autopsy. The mirror reflected back a terminal culture. The ads offered various forms of palliative care along the way, and the ease of letting go. The cast of Fast & Furious is here, driving down Highway 101 to what may as well be a retirement home. The beer brand that enraged everyone on the cultural right by acknowledging the existence of trans people wants to let you know the grill is back on; guileless smiles all around. Why worry? It'll all be over soon.
There was no suggestion of anything new to be found, just the dregs of something swirling away. This is true in both content and form. As to the latter, the dominant genre of ad was a mildly reheated batch of celebrity spokespeople saying the name of a product into the camera. That's been the most reliable way to sell a product for decades, and it works; what stood out about this year's edition was a pose of self-awareness.
LeBron James stars in a commercial about LeBron James starring in a commercial. Pete Davidson and Tom Brady make fun of themselves for being, respectively, weird-looking and robotic. Jeremy Strong acts out his New Yorker profile. The joke is that they are in on the joke, a crude retreat into bland postmodernism that accepts and broadcasts the emptiness of the form. Even those are mere iterations, as it's been years since a number of NBA players starred in ads in which they were given checks to mindlessly repeat that a certain streamer had live sports. Quality is incidental, perhaps even harmful. It is easy to imagine an ad in next year's Super Bowl in which a famous celeb with apparent sincerity refuses to participate in the cynical work of advertising and expresses their disgust with the entire genre of Super Bowl ads in a society so deeply riven by the wastes of unchecked consumerism and income inequality, only for the screen to go black and flash the logo of a major car brand.
Like this year's reheated celebrity endorsements, that might still work: The point of advertising is not to entertain or titillate or inspire, but simply to get you to think of the name of the product. Everything that can get co-opted, will. This is why writing about advertisements is generally a loser's game. The second you mention the name of any product you are writing about, all critique is subsumed by the viral self-replicating logic of the form. This stale genre knows it is selling itself to a populace of consumers who understand the cultural heft of a Super Bowl ad. The fact that it still remains the dominant form shows how low the bar is; even a good ad is still an ad.
But that's not what made me feel bad. What made me feel bad was the loose group of ads that eschewed predigested nostalgia slop to at least situate themselves in our current moment. These ads were slightly more multifarious in form, though they hewed to a pattern. The world has Bad Stuff in it, whether that's the health care system, enemies of freedom, breast cancer, or "hate" in the most generic possible sense. In the text of the ads, this is Bad Stuff that comes from nowhere and is so denuded of context or specificity as to be almost perfectly abstract. That the remedy is inevitably "Buy our products" is obvious and banal—again, that's the point of every advertisement—but it still feels jarring because it's being offered up against genuine societal horrors, hinted at but kept just out of frame.
If ads are mirrors, what these ones reflected was a society in decline and what they offered was not a solution or even a cause, simply an amelioration, a way to take that decline without pain. Take the ad for the company that sells dick pills and GLP-1 agonists in the mail. They begin from the premise that healthcare is inaccessible and prohibitively expensive, but rather than resolve that tension with even something as small as a means of navigating it, they offer you more of a meek workaround. Broader decline here is treated like background radiation; the company's business depends on you accepting that healthcare will remain intractably broken and unnavigable forever. Their product's existence and marketing argument is a bet that nothing substantial will ever change for the better and that getting the medicine you need from your actual doctor or health insurer will always be impossible and usuriously expensive.
What is different here from ads past? I would argue the distinction is in the acceptance. There is no spelling out the dangers of, say, car theft, then selling an anti-theft device against that fear, merely a gesture at unspecific societal retreat and a means by which to accommodate oneself to it.
We are living in a time where marketing has achieved a total victory over its natural enemy: journalism. The two mutually opposing forces are locked in a struggle over who gets to define and tend to the boundaries of consensus reality, a struggle that has seen marketing beat the ass of journalism through the latter's contractions and layoffs, and the desiccation of the social internet for a decade now. Donald Trump is foremost a creature of advertising and spectacle, and his ascendance and consolidation of power represents, among other things, a final triumph of marketing. The ideal reality for marketers is a frictionless one, in which they can roll out the same celebrities for formulaic ad spots, or sell products through fear without ever having to name what you should be afraid of or articulate a point of view on it. Make it generic and make it something that can be accepted with comfort.
Harrison Ford, starring in a commercial that may as well be called The New Wing Of My Vacation House In Aspen Won't Pay For Itself, says "You don't have to be friends with someone to wave at them," as two cars diverge. I would have thought that was deep when I was 10, and the point as it's delivered is that you should shut up, buy a car, and trick yourself into thinking that's enough. Accept a society defined by mutual mistrust. The emotional hook for a new reality game-show is that people have to watch their family members suffer—a hideous reflection of the ever-present right-wing family-terror boogeyman—one soothed by the possibility of at least getting some money out of the experience. The winner is whoever withholds mercy the longest.
The big AI commercial varied slightly from its counterparts, though an ad made by a generative AI company that makes the case for itself as the next-in-line successor to civilization-defining technologies like fire, airplanes, and the internet and then shows that the main thing you can do with its technology is ask it to "summarize this article for me," felt less like an advertisement and more like a threat. This product doesn't even have to accomplish anything of value to help accelerate the death of the planet and critical thinking.
The thing to remember here is that these are just reflections, and mirrors lie. Just because you are told that culture is a dead end, that things will only get worse and you should accept that, and that all you'll ever get is increasingly thin gruel to subsist on, doesn't mean you have to listen. Remember, this year's slate of ads would have been perfectly suited to a Kansas City win, in that the message is that nothing surprising or funny can happen, just a grim inevitability you could not stop if you wanted to, and the Chiefs got the shit kicked out of them.
