The Puppy Bowl Ads Aren’t Good Anymore
So, I have a new episode of THE PODCAST to share, and I bring it up not only to shill myself but also because what was supposed to be a Super Bowl preview chapter ended up being me and my co-host Sam bitching about Super Bowl ads for 40 minutes. They aren’t good anymore. Super Bowl ads have gone the way of movies: everything has to be a blockbuster. The weird little den of creativity that Super Bowl ads used to be is gone. Companies do entire lead-up campaigns and even spoil their own ads early to get ahead on attention. Half the ads are just movie trailers or overwrought car ads or that inspid #GotJesus shit that’s popped up the last few years. I hope you are ready for even more AI commercials. They are coming. Super Bowl ads used to be multiple chuckles per ad break. Now it’s a few decent chuckles per game, encased in tons of eye rolling. There was a commercial in 2018 with Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman having a rap battle that was the moment I realized Super Bowl ads were dead as we knew them. Creativity and humor has been replaced by spectacle. The “joke” here is that it’s Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman rapping. There’s no cleverness, no setup, nothing. Just “hey look, celebrities doing things they normally don’t!”. It’s dead. I go eat food and pee during ad breaks now.
Anyway enough complaining if you want a different Super Bowl preview I have a SECOND podcast to share, one I was a guest for instead of creating. Thank you to History On Film for having me so I could talk about how the entire Jaguars fandom, to me, is encapsulated in this gif.
POST YOUR PUPPY PUNS
Sean McDermutt
Mike and Matt LeFur
Jim and John Harbark
Matt Shaggy
Drake Spay
Sheddinguer Sanders
Kevin Pet-ullo
Azeez Al-Shaggier
Trevor Pawrence
Micah Pawsons
Petairoa McMillan
Howlie Roseman
Cam Skattebone
Cris Colliesworth (Now here’s a good boy)
Boney Romo
BY THE WAY, THE BETS FOR THE FINAL GAME:
If the Patriots win, I will draw the Rise of Skywalker moment “Somehow the Patriots returned” with evil Drake Maye
If the Seahawks win, I will draw The GEQBUS, having Ghostbusted the spectre of Super Bowl XLIX, mission accomplished
JJ “K9” McBarky
Sam “Dog Emperor QuarterBark of the United States” Darnold
Kenneth Walker has dibs on “K9.”
As much as it pains me, I find the concept of evil Drake Maye hilarious, precisely because of how disconnected it is to reality. But if you’re gonna make Drake Maye Evil, you have to include his wife in that picture somewhere because the corniness comes from both of them.
But it’s jagsguy.jpg, not jagsguy.gif.
BTW, the best ad in Super Bowl history was during Super Bowl XLIII when that one Comcast affiliate in Arizona broadcast porn.
Bone Nix
JK Doggins
Courtland Pupton
Nik Boneitto
Jonathon Pooper
Pat Sirtail II
Pack Allen
Sean Petton
Leash allen
I do feel like it’s worth considering that “the ads aren’t good anymore” is partially because we are all old now. Most of those “great” ads from back in the day probably aren’t that good. And the reason the ads are less culturally relevant now is because “being excited about advertisements” is very much a generational thing that has largely died out.
Not really, especially if you have watched the compilations of older SB ads. It’s easy to chalk it up to people getting older but it wasn’t necessarily true.
There is something to the fact that we’re only going to remember the good ones.
But still, I recently went back and watched compilations of older Super Bowl ads. And there some really funny ones every year and some chuckles for others. And I didn’t have that experience for the last few Super Bowls.
What’s odd is that it would be easy to blame commercials being less funny now on how comedy has changed over the decades. But the vast majority of the funny commercials I watched would be fine today. Something else shifted. Maybe advertisers got data that humor makes commercials memorable, but doesn’t compel buying products. Or maybe humorless executives want them to be more celebrity-laden spectacles to justify their price.
I think the big price of the ads became a kind of signifier of the shift. They were always expensive, but it feels now like companies are going out of their way to make a show of how much money they spent rather than just spending that money and trying to make a good ad. It feels like the golden age of ads (I’d say the late 90’s to early 10’s) were more about marketing firms having more creative freedom to get weird, but celebrity endorsement ads probably got more attention and sold more, so they all started doing that.
None of these companies did the lead up ad campaigns like they do now, either. Those early 2000’s ads felt like normal commercials, but with some more fun. Now they all feel like the companies are trying to make bombastic cultural events.
Once upon a time the Superbowl Ads were “cool concept that cost much to make normally”. But yeah, now they do seem be just spectacles. I think part of it is that the rise cgi means means you can do basically any visual cheap also
Nah, like some of the other folks that replied to you said, you can easily find highlights of good Super Bowl commercials, and the ones from recent super bowls are simply not as good. It’s more than nostalgia.
What I DO think has changed is that companies have been able to improve the writing and acting of their regular commercials (especially insurance companies), to the point that they are just as funny as some of the old Super Bowl commercials. So now when we get to the actual Super Bowl, advertisers feel the need to upstage “ordinary” commercials that you might see in May or June. As a result, we get Super Bowl commercials that try way too hard.
But there’s highlights of recent super bowl commercials too though. We just have seen all of them (good or bad) recently, whereas we only remember the great ones.
Compare to the older ones, they’re not as frequent. As it said, it’s easy to chalk it up to what you said but it’s hardly accurate. Only truth related to what you’re saying is that the quality did started to go down sometime in the late 2000s.
If Doritos commercials gets tame, you know things are going down hill.
Except for the licking residue off someone’s finger, I’m good without that…*shudder*
I think that celebrities being the center of the commercials is when the Super Bowl ads got a lot worse, and this can be seen with the Sabrina Carpenter one where the whole point is just “look at this celebrity” and that’s it. Of course, the Ads got worse when it comes to AI and the standards have gotten so low, that a rather mediocre Pepsi ad (or should I say Medium) is being lavished with praise because it doesn’t use AI, though I will say the one good thing they did was make fun of coke for using it.
Oh yeah, and the “He Gets Us” Ads are pretty awful too. They present themselves as wholesome and it seems that way until you look into the histories of the foundation behind it funding anti gay and anti abortion garbage. The funniest thing is the ads were called “woke” by evangelicals and so now they’re shifting towards more openly right-wing commercials as a result.
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/02/05/super-bowl-ads-he-gets-us-jesus/
I really don’t understand who Sabrina Carpenter is for honestly. I see constant criticism of her online that she’s “for the male gaze” but I don’t know any men who listen to her music? Or follow her in any way?
She’s a pop girlie, she’s for the pop girlies.
My wife likes her, that’s her audience
I feel like the specter of past Super Bowl ads at this point is making things worse, people always trying to hit home runs usually with celebrities and striking out constantly just makes everything around it more annoying.
The fact that so many ads nowadays feel evil to the core far past being ads isn’t helping matters, from the stuff that’s made with AI, to all the crypto bullshit that took place around the COVID super bowls, to the ads that just are for AI, the Hobby Lobby bullshit artists, the Super Bowl ads just feel more dystopian than they were a decade ago.
“I go eat food and pee during ad breaks now.”
What? (I know most people understand that he means that he pees, as well as eats food, during the ad breaks)
“I go eat food, and pee, during ad breaks now.”
Alternatively: “I go eat food, and drink pee, during ad breaks now.”
last one sounds like a Dave’s prototypical Eagles fan
Thank you again to Dave for coming on, and thank you to everyone who checked out my show! The History on Film Podcast is a 100% ad-free labor of love, so all downloads go directly to my ego and sense of self-worth <3
I definitely think this is going to be the worst batch of ads ever, only to be outdone by every subsequent year.
Deebo Spaniel
Terrier McLaurin
Corgi Davis
Fetcher Cox
I’ve never agreed with an alt text more.
Ads peaked with the Budweiser Clydesdales lining up for a PAT kick.
Christian McCafghan
Cockerpooka Nacua
Shedder Sanders
Dalmatiean McVay
Looks like the Pats are now raped.
Note Steve Hutchinson has a job with the Seahawks as well, he’s getting a ring.