Super Bowl Ads: A Fun Dive into the Highlights and Low Points
Super Bowl 60 proved the game is optional. The ads are the main character.
Super Bowl Sunday is supposed to be about football. In reality, it’s a national group project in paying attention.
This year, the game itself didn’t exactly sprint out of the gate. Or if you’re a Patriots fan like many of us based out of New England - leave the gate. It had that slow, defensive rhythm where the kicker starts looking like the MVP and the snack table gets more engagement than the red zone. Which is exactly when the ads matter most.
And Super Bowl 60 gave us plenty: a singalong that split living rooms, AI anxiety served three different ways, a dinosaur cameo that actually made sense, and a puppy rescue that somehow managed to be both heartwarming and mildly unsettling.
The question underneath all of it: are Super Bowl ads still selling… or are they mostly chasing attention?
The Super Bowl isn’t a normal media buy
A Super Bowl spot isn’t “efficient.” It isn’t “optimized.” It’s a cultural swing. You’re not just buying impressions, you’re buying a chance to create something people carry into Monday morning.
That means the comparison game is brutal. The audience isn’t evaluating your ad in a vacuum. They’re ranking it against everything that runs in that same window. Outside of the top few, most of the night gets forgotten fast.
So if you’re going to show up on the biggest stage in advertising, there are two options:
Use the moment like it’s the moment.
Run a standard brand spot and hope nobody notices you spent a premium to be forgettable.
Coinbase and the karaoke coin flip
The ad that sparked the most immediate reaction from the Campfire crew was Coinbase’s karaoke moment: a full-verse singalong to Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody.”
No complicated product pitch. No heavy explanation. Just a clear read on the room: people watching in groups, drinks poured, game dragging a bit, attention drifting. Then suddenly—everyone’s singing.
That’s what made it work. It treated the Super Bowl like what it really is: a collective living-room event.
But it also created a real divide.
Some people loved it for the vibe and the shared experience. Others had the same thought: fun… but what does this have to do with Coinbase? The brand connection landed late, and for some at Campfire it felt like the logo got slapped on at the end.
There’s also the nostalgia fatigue factor. Backstreet Boys showed up in multiple spots, and when a cultural reference is everywhere in one night, it stops feeling like a clever choice and starts feeling like a default setting.
Still, even the skeptics admitted it nailed something important: it got people to do something, not just watch something.
The AI takeover, and why it started to feel exhausting
AI was one of the loudest themes of the night. Some ads tried to make it funny. Some tried to make it feel inevitable. Some tried to make it feel friendly.
A few landed because they were timely and self-aware. But there was also a clear tipping point where viewers started to feel like, okay… we get it.
What was striking was how strong the reaction can be in a room of real people. Not “I don’t understand AI.” More like: I’m tired of being sold a future I didn’t ask for.
That’s the risk with a trend wave. Brands all rush toward the same cultural current, and suddenly it’s not clever—it’s clutter.
And when tech becomes the headline, brands can accidentally disappear behind it.
Dino Wi-Fi: why Xfinity’s Jurassic Park concept worked
Not every ad needs to be a philosophy essay.
Xfinity’s Jurassic Park concept was one of the cleanest examples of entertainment doing its job. Familiar reference, solid execution, easy to follow, memorable without trying to be deep.
It was fun in a way that didn’t feel forced. It showed up, did the thing, and got out.
Sometimes that’s the entire assignment.
Puppy saves and the Ring paradox
Then there was the Ring “lost dog” spot: emotional, simple, and built on a near-perfect human instinct—nobody wants the puppy to lose.
These kinds of ads often perform well because they bypass the brain and go straight to the heart. It’s a cheat code, and it works.
But there’s also the paradox… the very thing that makes the story possible is the thing that makes people uneasy. Always-on cameras. Neighborhood surveillance. The subtle reminder that we’re all being recorded all the time.
For some around our fire at Campfire, the takeaway was warmth: I didn’t even know Ring could do that.
For others, it was discomfort: cool… and also creepy.
Both are true. That’s modern advertising in a sentence.
The real tension: cultural moments vs. brand memorability
Here’s the part brands don’t always want to hear:
A cultural moment can be unforgettable without the brand being unforgettable.
There’s a classic example of this with a huge “everybody remembers it” moment where the brand behind it gets lost in the story. People remember the spectacle. They remember the emotion. They remember the meme. But they couldn’t tell you who paid for it.
That’s the line Super Bowl advertisers have to walk. You want the moment to travel. But you also need it to connect back to you in a way that isn’t stapled on at the end.
Fragmented attention changes everything
Another reality hiding in plain sight is that a lot of people aren’t watching the Super Bowl straight through.
Even in rooms where the game is on, attention is split. People are mingling. Phones are out. Kids are in and out. Someone’s making another plate. Someone’s knitting. Someone is half-watching and fully commenting.
And plenty of people catch up afterward through highlight reels.
So your ad isn’t just competing against other ads. It’s competing against distraction.
That’s why “moments” matter more than ever. If you can create something that makes people look up—or talk about it later—you’ve already done the hardest part.
So… are Super Bowl ads still selling?
Sometimes. But the bigger truth is that they’re trying to earn something more scarce than a click, they’re looking to turn attention into memory.
The ads that worked best this year did a few things well:
They understood the context of the Super Bowl instead of fighting it
They made people feel something quickly (joy, surprise, relief, nostalgia)
They didn’t rely solely on celebrities as the idea
They used AI as a tool or a joke, not a substitute for a point of view
They created a moment people could carry into Monday
Because that’s the real win now.
Not just being seen. Being remembered.
And if you’re going to spend Super Bowl money, that’s the only scoreboard that matters.
