Another year, another Super Bowl, another night celebrating one of America's favorite cultural cornerstones: Advertisements.
Somehow the Super Bowl has become the biggest day for creative commercials and this year is no exception. Which is not to say that this year's crop of ads was particularly stellar, I don't foresee any of them becoming cultural icons as the ads of years past, however that's also not to say that there weren't some stand out spots.
Of course, the most important ads of the night were the trailers for upcoming genre movies and shows. Marvel Studios gave us a new look at "Doctor Strange: The Multiverse of Madness" and "Moon Knight" while Amazon teased "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" and Universal released the trailer for "Jurassic World: Dominion."
There's really not much to say about any of them. The trailers for Marvel and Amazon's showings are remarkably context free, giving us a lot of visual candy to enjoy without really spoiling much of the story. And in Marvel's case you can't trust your eyes anyway. The studio has become remarkably adept in the art of trailer misdirection, using out-of-context scenes and sometimes straight up altered visual effects to give audiences a false impression of what actually happens in the film. Once upon a time I was the kind of viewer that would scour trailer's frame-by-frame for clues to predict how a film would play out, but nowadays such endeavors are practically pointless.
Anyway, I'm kind of getting off track. Back to the ads.
While on the subject of movies, I'm not sure what's more unsettling, the fact that Oscar winner Chloe Zhao directed a minute long short film about a horse recovering from an injury in order to sell beer, or that it makes perfect sense because I know the backstory of that horse and have an emotional attachment to it, its owners, and their dog.
Why am I emotionally attached to the ongoing saga, told a minute at a time every few years, of a couple that met because their pets got along?
Meanwhile, in one of the more special effect heavy ads of the night, Nissan floats the idea that Eugene Levy has untapped potential as an action movie star. That's not even a joke. After watching him throw out some quips to Dave Bautista I'd actually be legitimately interested in Levy either doing a parody action movie or maybe one that just plays straight.
Commercials for electric vehicles were on the top of their game this weekend. Kia's ad featured an adorable CGI robot puppy that they would be fools not to make plushies of. Meanwhile, General Motors reunited the cast of "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" for a 90 second spot that was remarkably on brand.
Coming out of Amazon, their big game ad posits the humorous consequences of what could happen if Alexa could read your mind, which I would find funnier if Jeff Bezos working on this technology wasn't so plausible. This feels like one of those times where a commercial invents some outlandish concept and then a couple years later the company actually does it.
Booking.com brought in Idris Elba for one of my low-key favorite ads of the night. There was nothing flashy about it, intentionally so, but seeing Elba do a dad-joke about being lit was somehow incredibly amusing.
In one of the more novel commercials, Coinbase decided to cut right to the choice, putting up a QR code on the screen that would direct you to their app. It's almost genius in its simplicity. Why spend the extra money getting top Hollywood talent to do something wacky for 30 seconds to promote your service when you can just remove as many barriers as possible?
One might think it'd be a waste to spend Super Bowl ad money on a blank screen with a floating QR code but, considering their app apparently went down after it aired, I suspect that Coinbase got their money's worth.
Finally, I think my favorite ad of the evening came from Squarespace, giving us 30-seconds of Zendaya emoting while wearing fantastic outfits to an alliteration filled narrative extension of the famous "She sold seashells by the sea shore" tonguetwister. Call me a sucker for a solid concept and high production values.
Like I said, nothing in this year's ads will really set the world on fire, well with the exception of cryptocurrency and the power consumption it requires contributing to global warming.
Still, there was a fun crop of commercials this year and really, isn't that what the Super Bowl is all about?
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and wonders if the push for electric cars and the push for crypto will cancel each other out.
