Superbowl Commercials 2022

Fine. But because I want to, not because you told me to.

The best (and worst) Super Bowl 2022 commercials : NPR

The commercials were mostly lackluster, I thought. Nothing really stood out as overwhelmingly great, and by the end I was getting pretty tired of being told that I need to buy crypto currency RIGHT NOW.

I thought the best commercial by far was Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost dealing with their Alexa device.

I also enjoyed the Planters Nuts commentary on how stupid our politics are right now. The Lays Chips commercial with Seth Rogan with Paul Rudd was fun if you enjoy those actors… which I do. The NFL slot with the computer-game characters wrecking the house was more fun than I thought it would be. And the Rocket Mortgage spot with Anna Kendrick and the Barbie Dream House was fun.

Some honorable mentions go to the Dr. Evil nostalgia thing, the “Keeping up with the Joneses” truck ad, Schwarzenegger as Zeus, and Linsey Lohan at Planet Fitness. The QR code bouncing around for what felt like three hours was bold I guess, but ironically I didn’t have my phone with me and I think I would have resolutely refused to scan it even if I had. I am also fond of Eugene Levy, so his car ad was fun for me.

Everything else was generally fine… lots of ads for NBC shows that I will never watch, terrible-sounding diet beers, and lots of electric cars. I don’t think there was a commercial in there that I looked at and said, “wow, I can’t believe they paid Superbowl ad rates for THAT!”

I had missed the planter’s debate commercial. Thanks, that was really nice.

I thought this was uniformly the worst set of Super Bowl commercials I’ve ever seen.

I mostly rolled my eyes at all the Crypto commercials, but I have to admit, that one with Larry David made me laugh. Good use of Larry David!

The Irish Spring cult commercial was the one that made me giggle quite a bit.

I also appreciated Micky D’s warning me about their indecisive clientele holding up the line. I’ll remember not to go there.

From that NPR article:

I just finished a rewatch of HBO’s mob drama hit The Sopranos , so it was a kick to see co-star Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who played daughter Meadow Soprano, driving around one of Chevrolet’s all-electric Silverado trucks until she met up with the guy who played her brother A.J., Robert Iler. (Guess they didn’t get whacked in the finale after all?) But this feels like an odd generational play; consumers old enough to know who they are – and buy the trucks – aren’t part of the “new generation.” Consumers young enough to be part of the new generation might not know who these actors are. Unless they read a piece like this, I guess.

Come on Eric Deggins! I’m sure lots of people have been going back to watch the Sopranos on HBO Max. Especially when the new movie was coming out last year.

As I mentioned in the NFL thread, the Amazon Alexa commercial is so odd. It’s almost like they want us to distrust their Internet-connected microphone.

I thought the Arnold commercial was excellent, even with it being for a BMW.

Polestar 2 commercial got me to google “What is Polestar” during the Super Bowl. I thought it was a car from an existing car maker, so I wanted to know which one. But apparently Polestar is its own thing.

Crypto and Electric cars.

Got it.

Yes, it was basically making a joke that always-on Alexa is mishearing and/or recoding everything you do. Honesty that feels like a “meta” level play at normalizing intrusive IOT devices.

The Planters commercial really had… nuts… to it /sorry.

Our panel (which reviewed eight :30 ads) thought the Uber Eats ad was the most polarizing (in general, they hated it, but there were those who found it hilarious).

They liked Planet Fitness (Lohan, Shatner, Trejo, Rodman) the most. They liked Pringles a lot too. They hated Irish Spring for the weird culty vibes, and thought Rakuten was pretty awful too and a waste of Hannah Waddingham.

We didn’t review them because they weren’t available yet, but my two least favorite ads were the Matthew McConaughey ad for Salesforce (what even was that ad trying to sell?) and the Idris Elba ad for Booking dot com. Awesome job on them for getting Idris into their ad! Terrible job by them for not getting creative (producer/writers etc) who were up to the task of creating a Super Bowl ad with one of the hottest A-list actors on the planet in it.

Heh, while watching that I literally thought “WTF is this an ad for?”. I’m pretty sure that was a common reaction.

The meta ad showed they don’t understand the internet. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

At least hawk some Lincolns, McConoughey

I like the idea of the Salesforce ad: the message being fuck cyrpto and living on Mars, concentrate on keeping Earth livable. But I have no idea what Salesforce is, and how using “Salesforce” contributes to preventing global warming or whatever. Honestly, just the name Salesforce makes it sound like spreadsheet/office software or something.

That is why it is a bad ad.

Not sure why salesforce even feels the need to run a superbowl ad, other than to show off their immense market cap. I mean wasn’t erecting a giant phallus in downtown San Francisco enough? They aren’t marketing to individuals, and clearly they think the business people they are marketing to already know what they do.

That ad barely registered with me. As soon as I saw it was Waddingham I perked up with interest, but it wasn’t funny or interesting enough to stick with me. Until you mentioned it here, it had simply left my head.

Rakuten went in-house with the creative and production on that ad.

They probably should not have.

Salesforce and Ford both seemed to be running ads aimed at Elon Musk haters, which might kind of make sense for Ford-- but the Salesforce CEO is a big investor in a variety of New Space ventures.