The Drama Club: Super Bowl LX

Today in The Drama Club: AI colonized 35% of commercial breaks, Bad Bunny proved language is irrelevant when your vision is clear, the Backstreet Boys bankrupted their cultural cache, and a defense-heavy game that you won’t remember in two weeks. Let's go →

I have always loved Super Bowl spots. If you worked on anything that premiered yesterday, you should be extremely proud of your work. Super Bowl Sunday is still the biggest day in our industry and I know how much hard work goes into these spots. Congratulations to everyone.

The sad truth of this year's Super Bowl advertising is that there may not even be a spot folks are talking about today. Between the onslaught of AI spots, the desperate grasp at nostalgia, and brands trying to make us cry about chips, the commercial breaks were as much a battlefield as the game itself. 

We have to start with the real invasion happening in America: AI commercials. Over a third of the commercial breaks featured an AI spot and by the fourth quarter when Genspark, ai.com, and Base 44 hit back-to-back-to-back, I was so exhausted that dystopia felt unavoidable. The best of the bunch were Claude, who poked fun at OpenAI’s ChatGPT voice, and Gemini and Microsoft 365 Copilot, which both actually showed us what their products do instead of vibing about the future. Product features in practice is a revolutionary concept in the modern advertising creative review, apparently.

Meanwhile, over in nostalgia-land, Backstreet Boys appeared in two commercials for T-Mobile and then Coinbase. The Coinbase ad featured a karaoke aesthetic and was completely indecipherable. What was the brief? Why were we being asked to potentially sing along? What does a late-90s boy band have to do with cryptocurrency? The T-Mobile spot was a classic nostalgia commercial, which means to say you’ve seen it before (and probably done better) with different talent. It was astonishing to watch Backstreet Boys bankrupt their cultural cache in less than two quarters of football and I'm calling it: the estate is now worth nothing. In the same vein, Dunkin’ managed to cram every possible piece of '90s nostalgia into one spot and it still felt cringe. This is the third year in a row Dunkin’ has put all its chips on Ben Affleck and maybe it’s time for a new idea.

Similarly, auto brands are in an abusive relationship with emotional storytelling. Toyota ran not one but two spots trying to make us feel things about childhood wonder and driving. I'm begging them to mix it up. Just one year of not trying to make me cry about a Camry, PLEASE.

Thankfully, somewhere in the 77 commercials, a few spots actually understood the assignment Michelob Ultra with Lewis Pullman was the night’s first, “yes, this is a Super Bowl ad.” The spot was confident, charismatic, and understood what platform it was on. Wells Fargo got Marcello Hernández to make banking fun, which should be impossible but they did it. Pringles cast Sabrina Carpenter perfectly and the moment where her fans tackled her lover made of Pringles got the night’s biggest laugh out of me. Other celebrity moments that worked really well were TurboTax with Adrien Brody and Fanatics Sportsbook with Kendall Jenner.

Stray Observations

Ring had an INSANE stat: a dog a day is found via Ring. That's worth an entire Super Bowl commercial.

Ro syncs Sleigh Bells in a GLP-1 ad. I simply did not know how to process that.

Lays ran a spot aimed at making people emotional about CHIPS. Not everything needs to make us cry. Maybe we shouldn’t be crying from an ad at all?

Poppi got Charli XCX to say "make it poppi," which is smart casting at minimum.

Oakley/Meta is a smart brand collab and "Athletic Intelligence" is a good tag that managed to stick out in a sea of AI.

Svedka reminded us that Björk's "All Is Full of Love" video will always be famous.

WeatherTech buying Super Bowl space every year remains so random but they're probably the only brand in their category activating here, so, good for them.

If nothing else, Bad Bunny’s halftime show was proof that when you trust your vision and execute with precision, language is irrelevant.

It really helps that someone on the creative team clearly thought, "there are going to be tens of millions of people who will not understand a single word of this so we need to visually make the story exceptionally clear" and prepared accordingly. Even as an intermediate Spanish speaker, a majority of Benito’s halftime show was indecipherable to me. But not once was I confused as to what story was being told or how proud our halftime performer was to be from Puerto Rico.

Unsurprisingly, the technical elements here were firing on all cylinders. The camera work was nothing short of exceptional. The dancers brought it (gay dancers, I see you!) with every 8-count. Celebrated Latino businesses like Los Angeles’ Villas Tacos were on full display. Celebrities like Cardi B and Pedro Pascal were vibing amongst the performers. The set design was some of the best in Super Bowl history and managed to create a litany of performance areas that felt unique and visually exciting. Watching Benito move from section to section brought back memories of The Weeknd’s 2021 show, which was the first to really utilize distinct sets to create opportunities for story vignettes and exciting cutaways. 

Outside of Rihanna’s performance three years ago, all of the Super Bowl halftime shows produced by Apple Music have featured superstar guest appearances, and Benito’s was no different. At the very center of the set was a previously unannounced performance by Lady Gaga. Her performance of "Die With a Smile" was the only English song of the night and marked the first televised performance of the global hit. If you did not know, Bad Bunny has been a Little Monster forever, with Lady Gaga having introduced him when he debuted on SNL and Benito having worn Gaga merch at multiple public appearances. To see them together, although a bit out of place amongst the entire performance, was effective as both an ode to her status as a legend and a unique performance of one the biggest hits in recent memory. Meanwhile, the other guest was Ricky Martin, whose brief guest spot served more as an interlude than a standalone moment. However, I am fairly sure his performance makes him the first openly gay musician to perform at a Super Bowl halftime show. Someone fact-check me on that.

Of course, everyone expected this show to be political and controversial, when really it was neither. It was a love letter to Puerto Rico and, at its conclusion, a celebration of what it means to work hard and succeed in the United States. The only words Bad Bunny said in English during the entire performance were, “God bless America,” while the jumbotron behind him read THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE and “DtMF” simmered in the background. In that moment, the show felt like a unifying cultural statement, not just a performance. It should work as proof to all of us that when you center your identity and execute at the highest level, the whole world can show up to support you.

Let's be honest: Super Bowl LX was NOT a good game.

It was defence-heavy. It was kick-heavy. Frankly, it was yawn-heavy. This was the kind of game where you could appreciate excellent defensive play but never actually feel the electricity that makes football exciting. We really didn't even have a game until the fourth quarter and then that slipped away rather quickly after some bad plays by the Patriots.

The game did start off with an immediate first down, which set us off on a good foot, but momentum never really built the way you want it to in a championship. Sam Darnold was throwing like he had nothing to lose, and the Patriots secondary did solid work applying pressure and creating stops. But every promising drive seemed to stall out, with all of them in the first half ending with either field goals or punts. The first flag didn't come until three minutes left in the second quarter, which tells you how disciplined both teams were playing but also how little was actually happening. This was a game about strategy and stops, not about explosiveness and scoring.

By the fourth quarter, things finally opened up but by then we'd already sat through three quarters of field position battles and conservative play-calling. There were moments of brilliance—exciting sacks, smart defensive reads—but they were islands in a sea of three-and-outs. It all came a little too late to build the kind of momentum that makes a Super Bowl memorable.

The big stat of the night? Seattle set a new record for field goals in a Super Bowl game. Let that record be the greatest summary of the entire evening. Respect to both defences for showing up, but this one simply won't go down as an all-timer. If you love defensive football, you got your money's worth. For everyone else, it was a long night waiting for something to happen.