I really enjoyed this one.
Matt Damon: “Sometimes it’s really hard to be your friend.”
Also good and unexpected.
And just perfect casting in this one. :)
Arnold hamming it up, with some Danny D saving the commercial.
I want this ring to be a real thing.
Man I know I’m getting old but this has been the most wtfs per minute I’ve ever experienced
someone was expecting a blowout
I thought the ads were… not good this year.
I think the only one I sort of liked was the history of Volkswagen.
And of course the one for Scientology was deeply moving. My life lacks direction and they might be just the answer I’ve been seeking.
I enjoyed the Homes dot com ads, they just kept going and going and they weren’t all good, but they got some good laughs out of me.
So let me give you four ads, in alphabetical order.
Hellman’s Mayonnaise (“Mayo Cat” with Kate McKinnon and Pete Davidson)
Mountain Dew Baja Blast (“Having a Blast” with Aubrey Plaza and Nick Offerman)
Pringles (“Mr. P” with Chris Pratt)
Squarespace (“Hello Down There”, with Martin Scorcese).
Which of those four thirty-second ads was the best use of the millions of dollars spent on it?
Out of those, my favorite was definitely Mountain Dew Baja Blast.
I’m a little disappointed that Taco Bell no longer has that drink exclusively though. It always made for a special treat to go to Taco Bell and get the excellent Baja Blast that you couldn’t get anywhere else.
Yeah, I thought Mountain Dew was the best of those four, and proof that Aubrey Plaza can make even a dumb ad appealing.
And Michael Cera’s Cerave spot was pretty funny, up until the stupid boardroom meeting at the end.
I just wish more ads would go with narrative instead of stupid-joke overload. And they’re often deliberately stupid, like the whole joke is how not funny this celebrity is being right now.
The ad that made me the most curious was the Poppi Soda one. It just kind of blew my mind that someone would claim to make a soda that’s healthy for you. Is that even possible? How? What the heck? But they wouldn’t lay that claim at the super bowl without some serious backing, surely?
Anyway, I’ll keep an eye out for that next time I go to the grocery store, out of sheer curiosity.
MLB reporter and part-time soda blogger and expert Emma Baccellieri reports that bottled Baja Blast is fine…but is no substitute for fountain Baja Blast.
The best thing about the Baja Blast spot is that Aubrey Plaza’s clothes throughout are Baja Blast aqua-colored. And she’s always holding up the bottle with the label prominently displayed.
That’s a fantastic bit of brand awareness and positioning work.
The biggest minus on that ad is that if you’re not familiar with Parks & Rec, you don’t make the connection when Nick Offerman shows up.
Luckily that isn’t a problem because everyone is familiar with Parks and Rec.
Everyone worth a goddamn!
We watched this episode of Gilmore Girls last night and all three of us immediately started singing, “Get on your feet…”
There is absolutely a Super Bowl commercial formula now, and it is very, very tiresome.
As seen on Bluesky:
Super Bowl Ad
Kramer from Seinfeld: ahh! Jerry, this football game, it’s OUT OF CONTROL
Bart Simpson: don’t have a cow man
Kate Upton: I’ll have a cow
John Cena dressed like a genie: you said it
Voiceover: Raytheon defense systems, defending our shores now more than ever
Did everyone get the anti-Tesla ads, or were they just in the DC market (to get the Congressmen)? Thought they were straightforward and well done.
I thought the CeraVe ad with Michael Cera was the best one, followed by DunKing. Everything else was dumb. Good to know the dignity of both Patrick Stewart and Anthony Hopkins are for sale.
Perfect! Just insert a reaction shot of Jesus washing feet.
I’d laugh more if that wasn’t quite so accurate and depressing.
Our group of 100 people who rated ads put the Hellman’s Mayo ad at the top, with Mountain Dew and Pringles both not far behind it. They found the Squarespace ad absolutely baffling. And with a group that was 40% under the age of 34, we had one person ask when Scorcese made an appearance in the ad he directed: “Is that Woody Allen?”
BTW, the key piece of sentiment for the Hellman’s ad? One word, and it came up a ton in discussions: “Cat.”
Put a cute cat in your commercial and you are 90% there.
AI can take over and we won’t even know the difference.