Here is my annual critical ranking of the Super Bowl commercials. Included are the new, national ads that were shown during the game itself.
The trends? Nothing controversial, as you would expect, but also — and perhaps for associated reasons — very little creativity. It was a bad year for ads; the ones at the top of this list aren’t much better than average. More spots than usual depended entirely on the appeal of a relatable celebrity (who was almost certainly male). Concepts beat ideas — there was a lot of fussy, overly complicated silliness and not much in the way of simple, effective storytelling or mood setting.
(The many regional ads, movie and TV trailers and house ads for Fox broadcasts are not included. And whatever that thing with Bill Murray was, it didn’t count.)
Artificial intelligence may bring about the end of human life as we know it, but this pixelated, pulsating animation was the most purely pleasurable spot of the night.
No. 2
Nike
Female athletes like Sha’Carri Richardson and Caitlin Clark compete and strike poses to a jackhammer beat in an arresting black-and-white production, Nike’s first Super Bowl ad since 1998.
No. 3
National Football League
The N.F.L.’s own feel-good promo, “Somebody,” is affecting in a highly produced, can’t-we-all-just-get-along manner. Its implicit endorsement of diversity and inclusion offers a muted contrast to the league’s decision to forgo the “End Racism” end-zone slogan.
David Beckham learns he has a secret twin, who turns out to look a lot like Matt Damon. Reasonably charming, and Ben Affleck jokes never get old.
No. 5
Squarespace
The actor Barry Keoghan rides a donkey around ye olde rural Ireland (he’s back in the world of “The Banshees of Inisherin”), delivering customers’ websites by throwing laptops into farmyards and through pub windows. It’s cute, even though it’s designed to ensure that Keoghan yells “Squarespace!” every few seconds.
No. 6
The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism
Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady trade insults for 15 seconds, spitting out generic reasons for hating each other. Their celebrity is a distraction from the message about tolerance, but when Snoop, now himself, says, “I hate that things are so bad that we have to do a commercial about it,” it still hits home.
Gordon Ramsay is recruited to cook for a visiting extraterrestrial played by Pete Davidson. The scenario is clever, though the Ramsay-to-Davidson ratio is exactly the opposite of what you would want.
No. 8
He Gets Us
A series of lovely images of despair and connection, set to Johnny Cash’s rendition of “Personal Jesus.” How it illustrates the tagline “Jesus showed us what greatness really is” will not necessarily be clear to all viewers, but presumably IYKYK.
No. 9
Ritz
Those noted grumps Aubrey Plaza and Michael Shannon show off their saltiness, because Ritz crackers are salty. (Bad Bunny drops by, for the sake of variety.) It’s more intelligible than most of the one-joke ads, and Plaza and Shannon are a good pair.
The likely progress of climate change is charted along the timeline of a newborn girl’s life. A little clunky and sanctimonious in its execution but unimpeachable in its sentiments.
No. 11
The national ad for Google’s Gemini personal assistant is likely to be the most slickly handsome production in the field. If the use of Capra-esque family moments to humanize an A.I.-generated voice that coaches a dad for a job interview completely creeps you out, however, feel free to move this to the bottom of the list.
No. 12
Doritos
Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norell, the winners of a $1 million contest, created an ad with something most of the agencies don’t seem interested in: a story. It’s nebulous — an alien tries very hard to wrestle a bag of Doritos away from its human owner — but it’s there.
One of the better executions of a paper-thin comic idea (not being able to say “Homes.com is best” on the air), ending with that most welcome of famous pitchmen, Morgan Freeman. A second ad wasn’t as clever but had even more Freeman.
No. 14
Novartis
The Swiss pharmaceutical company calls a reverse: 40 seconds of images of women’s breasts, ranging from silly to stereotypically provocative, are followed by a sober pitch for more attention to breast-cancer screening. The cancer survivor Wanda Sykes stars in the ad without male help, a rare accomplishment for a female celebrity this year.
No. 15
On
Roger Federer and Elmo debate the spelling of the logo on Federer’s shoes. There’s barely even a coherent thought here, but come on, it’s Roger Federer and Elmo.
Appealing performances by a trio of influencers in an ode to indecision. Who knew that choosing a soda could be so anxiety-inducing?
No. 17
Pfizer
A small boy puts on the gloves for big pharma, figuratively boxing his way through cancer with the presumptive help (not shown) of Pfizer drugs. Stirring in a not particularly moving way, perhaps because the focus is on celebration rather than on the fight.
No. 18
National Football League
In a “Ferris Bueller”-vintage high school scenario, the girl jocks kick the behinds of the boy jocks on the football field, leading to a plug for girl’s flag football as a varsity sport. Well choreographed, with some action-exploitation energy, but it feels innocuous in a world with a President Trump executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
Channing Tatum teaches the actual players of the Wrexham soccer club in Wales — subject of the series “Welcome to Wrexham” — how to do celebration dances. It’s always fun to watch Tatum move, though on the evidence of this and any number of movies, there is no one left on earth who knows how to film someone dancing.
No. 20
Rocket
The ad itself — a montage of homecoming scenes set to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” — was very pretty. The kicker, in which the screen cut to the stadium for what was supposed to be a live singalong by the crowd, was exactly the anticlimax the online home-finance company should have known it would be.
No. 21
Michelob Ultra
Catherine O’Hara and Willem Dafoe as pickleball hustlers playing for beer is a nice idea, though it goes on for too long.
Shaboozey, riding the wave from “A Bar Song” and his guest appearances on “Cowboy Carter,” sings “What a Wonderful World” backed by a gigantic, red, trumpet-playing gummy in a slight but pleasant and colorful spot.
No. 23
Tubi
The slightly surreal premise — that your preferences in streaming content will be coded into your DNA (and reflected in your anatomy) — works better than you’d expect. The mother’s “What if westerns aren’t hot when he grows up?” is one of the day’s better lines.
No. 24
DoorDash
The presence of the always engaging comedian Nate Bargatze elevates this otherwise indifferent (but frenetic) spot, in which he uses the money he saves on deliveries to clone himself.
Antonio Banderas is totally in on the joke, and he’s fun to watch as he’s transformed by the glory of his Bosch refrigerator. The appliance and tool company loses points, however, for the odd decision to pair Banderas with an actor playing the wrestler Randy Savage, who died in 2011.
No. 26
Häagen-Dazs
Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez, in a cool car on a coastal highway, slow down to enjoy ice cream bars to the sweet sound of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’.” The play on their “Fast and Furious” personas is negligible but nice to look at.
No. 27
Budweiser
Will the young men who drive beer sales respond to the soft, nostalgic pull of a Clydesdale nosing a keg across the countryside to the sound of the Bellamy Brothers? It’s a sobering thought. The horse is awfully cute, though.
Issa Rae’s indestructible likability graces a series of mild sight gags about the irritations of tax season.
No. 29
Duracell
Tom Brady’s batteries run down — he’s a robot, nudge, nudge — in a mildly amusing spot with a self-effacing, brand-reinforcing reference to the Brady roast.
No. 30
Ram Trucks
A fairy tale is remade as a comic blockbuster, with the ubiquitous Glen Powell — whose anodyne charm is apparently perfect for the current moment — in the role of Goldilocks and pickup trucks taking the place of porridge.
The company’s annual field-goal-kicking competition is awkward and humdrum, but this year’s edition reinforced the fact that Eli Manning is one of our most endearing sports personalities.
No. 32
Skechers
Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, is a more natural pitchman than you might expect. He also seems to be aware that the ad, in which he’s cast as a part-time hand model in order to sell slip-on shoes, makes no sense at all.
No. 33
WeatherTech
To the sound of “Born to Be Wild,” four women of grandmotherly age pile into a convertible and partake in strenuous and mildly racy antics. It all feels a little out of proportion to what’s being sold, which are floor mats.
The soft-drink brand revives the Pepsi Challenge, pitting zero-sugar colas against one another, with a resolutely utilitarian announcement that has the nice touch of focusing on (what looks like) a 50-year-old TV set.
No. 35
Coors Light
Human-sized sloths move, very slowly, through their routines at the office, the gym and other places on the Monday after the Super Bowl. That a case of Coors Light is the appropriate accompaniment for their dazed state seems like a mixed message at best.
No. 36
Hellmann’s
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunite at Katz’s so that she can fake another orgasm, this time inspired by mayonnaise. Crystal’s reactions are seamless, but the punchline doesn’t deliver.
“We should have paid for Matt” Damon, Casey Affleck tells his brother, Ben, and never has a commercial more accurately summed up its own irrelevance. At least viewers of the game didn’t have to sit through the endless Jeremy Strong-as-Paul Revere gag. For that, seek out the seven-minute version online.
No. 38
NerdWallet
A high-I.Q. beluga whale with Kieran Culkin’s voice retrieves a klutzy human’s cellphone. The message appears to be that we are a hapless race wholly dependent on the internet, and who can argue?
No. 39
Little Caesars Pizza
The pizza chain sells Crazy Puffs. Eugene Levy has crazy eyebrows. Done!
No. 40
YouTube TV
The difficulties of watching live sports through the millennia — back through the Colosseum to the truly captive audiences in caves — are solved by the internet. A little more formulaic than you’d expect from a tech titan.
No. 41
Meta
A Chris, a Chris and a Kris (Hemsworth, Pratt and Jenner) plug the tech giant’s A.I.-assisted Ray-Ban sunglasses. This pair of intermittently amusing spots sends the reassuring message that contemporary art is just there to be made fun of, with all the wit and grace you would expect from a tech giant.
No. 42
Lay’s
A young farm girl, left behind when everyone else heads to the field, plants and tends an equally forlorn potato. The aw factor is very high; the sudden pivot at the end…
Read More: The Super Bowl Ads, Ranked
