There’s a limit to how much anyone ought to expect from television commercials, and to how upset one should get when they fail to impress, but, at a cost of roughly five million dollars per thirty seconds, an all-time high, this year’s Super Bowl commercials provided conspicuously few bangs for all those bucks. When the funniest image of the night is three dogs hiding under a trench coat to buy Doritos, that’s not great. Mostly, I found myself confounded. Ryan Reynolds counts as a dreamboat celebrity? Pokémon is twenty years old? Was this really the best time to talk about diarrhea and opioid-induced constipation? People want to drive a Buick convertible?
It’s an election year, and yet only one commercial made specific reference to the ongoing Presidential campaign—a tepid Bud Light spot, starring the comedians Amy Schumer and Seth Rogen (a Canadian!) as fake populists, which was little more than an excuse to make a big-caucus joke. In the year of Donald Trump, political satire has to be sharper than that, and even more outrageous, to be memorable.
There were political messages to be found, but only if you went looking. SoFi, the lending company, broke the world down into financial winners (the great) and losers (the not great). Michelob Ultra and Fitbit lionized the yuppie pursuit of physical perfection. And the two best automobile ads of the night, Acura’s Van Halen screamfest and Audi’s suddenly sentimental David Bowie “Starman” spot, were both selling cars that start at around a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—which is about three times the median household income in the United States. Bernie Sanders will have plenty of fodder for his next stump speech.
But enough griping. They weren’t all terrible. Below are a few of the best, weirdest, and worst ads from this year’s Super Bowl.
THE BEST
Axe
The male-grooming brand, owned by Unilever, has long been known for running ads intended to stoke the anxieties of its potential young customers—to suggest, in effect, that the only way to score with women is to hide your body beneath Axe’s pungent fragrances. So it’s a measure of progress that this ad celebrates a wider, more realistic definition of manhood and recognizes that some men may even want to score with each other (in the extended version, above). Sure, it’s still a testosterone-fuelled concept of male performance, but at least it says that, these days, any man can do it.
No More
Among this year’s set of public-service advertisements—including Helen Mirren’s anti-drunk-driving speech for Budweiser and Colgate’s request that Americans turn off the water when they brush their teeth (with gestures to the Third World but no mention of Flint)—this short spot from No More, about domestic violence, was the most effective: succinct, understated, clever in its use of technology, and forceful in its juxtaposition of the happy background sounds of a Super Bowl party with the silence that accompanies so many incidents of partner-on-partner violence. The National Football League, which has been working to rehabilitate its public image on domestic-violence issues, paid for the airtime and production costs, and the commercial was made by the Grey Group, the same agency that the N.F.L. uses for its own ads. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the commercial sets the implied violence apart from the group of people watching football. (Caitlin Kelly wrote last year about the moral complexity of N.F.L.-sponsored domestic-violence ads.) Still, there is power in what remains unsaid and unseen, specifically in the subtle way that the ad reminds us of the darker “moods” and behaviors that watching sports can generate in some male fans.
Heinz
In the cute-dog category this year, I left the voting up to my own dog, who gets excited at the sight of any fellow-canine onscreen. She voted, judging by her level of agitated barking (sorry, neighbors), for this slightly surreal ad featuring a horde of Dachshunds in hot-dog costumes charging across a field to meet humans dressed as giant condiments. It doesn’t make sense—do these people want to cover the dogs with ketchup and eat them? Regardless, my pup seemed pleased. And E. B. White might have liked it, too.
Jeep
It might have gotten a bit lost just after halftime, when most people were probably still reviewing the show among their friends and praising Beyoncé, but Jeep's minute-long celebration of its seventy-five-year history—which featured a slide show of black-and-white photographs showing Jeep drivers ranging from mud-streaked G.I.s to Steve McQueen to Aretha Franklin—hit a sweet spot of nostalgia and brand loyalty. (It was also one of the few ads that wasn't released online before the game.) It might not be the kind of ad that will send lots of new people out to buy a Wrangler, but, judging from many responses on social media, it made current Jeep owners feel good about their S.U.V.s, and perhaps more likely to buy another one.
WeatherTech
Each year, a few ads lean on a little uplifting jingoism to get their messages across. This year, the best Made in America spot was an honest and straightforward ad for car-floor liners, a plainly useful but completely boring product. It proves that you don’t need Clint Eastwood’s menacing growl or Bob Dylan’s raspy monotone to feel good—for a moment, at least—about homegrown ingenuity.
THE WEIRDEST
Mountain Dew Kickstart
Last year, the award for the oddest niche product sold via the strangest commercial went to the super-glue company Loctite, which splurged for a thirty-second ad featuring oddball characters dancing while wearing red fanny packs. This time around, nothing matched that eccentric exuberance, but the ad for Mountain Dew Kickstart, a Frankenstein concoction of soda, juice, and caffeine, came the closest. It stars a terrifying hybrid creature that sings its own name—Puppymonkeybaby—and licks a man repeatedly on the face. Gross, nonsensical, maybe a little funny? Either way, it cost a cool five million to promote a beverage that, Lord willing, we’ll never be compelled to drink, sold by a creature we’ll all pray never to encounter.
THE WORST
Quicken Loans
If you were trying to create a more terrifying modern dystopia, you probably couldn’t do better than this commercial from Quicken Loans for its Rocket Mortgage product. “You could get a mortgage on your phone. And, if it were that easy, wouldn’t more people buy homes?” Um, probably? From there, the ad shows a cascading consumer frenzy in which people buy all kinds of expensive junk to fill those homes, leading to an economic renaissance. “Isn’t that the power of America itself?” the narrator asks.
The ad features a woman in a theatre literally buying a house by pushing a button on her phone. Wasn't the idea to make it harder? If the people who made this commercial were five years old, born after the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession, they might be excused for this balderdash.
Avocados from Mexico
This mostly unremarkable thirty-second ad loses a million points for its reference to last year’s most insufferable Internet meme.
National Football League
If you could sit through this without squirming, you’d already drunk too many Bud Lights. A chorus of kids and adults wearing choir robes in the colors of their favorite N.F.L. teams sings about the nights on which they were conceived, in a grotesquely modified version of Seal’s love song “Kiss from a Rose.” None of the mental images conjured by this ad are very pleasant. "Mom and Dad looked at each other / One thing led to another . . .” Ick. This lame innuendo is even more off-putting than PuppyMonkeyBaby. And I couldn’t help but think of the domestic-violence P.S.A. that was made by the same ad agency. What happens when our favorite team loses?
