Despite not being the best person to go to for sports takes (I sometimes get called out for mixing up my leagues), it’s still a tradition for me to sit down and laugh my head off at each year’s Super Bowl halftime commercials.
After watching all 66 of the ads myself and thoroughly analyzing others’ comments online, I’ve compiled my hot takes below.
Enjoy.
The Bad
Poppi
For a brand that markets their products as a “healthy” soda alternative (a quick Google search shows that it’s actually quite the scheme), this ad convinced me that I might instead get high after drinking one. If you ever decide to theme your ad after “the vibes,” remember to never direct a motorcyclist to ride through a classroom after drinking your product, Rachel Sennott to manhandle flamethrowers or someone else to spew hot pink confetti from their mouth — at least, not for an isolated “healthy” soda promotion.
MANSCAPED
As succinctly put by one online commenter, “the hair one is just gross.” Conceptually, it’s not entirely unrecoverable: anthropomorphic clumps of hair trying to guilt trip you for shaving them off. But all falls apart when you listen a little more closely to the lyrics. No, Manscaped, I did not want or need to watch animated hair sing “Once I danced upon your chest, covered your pecks I did my best” or “when you sliced me from the patch above your crack.” No, thank you.
Hellmann’s
What I imagined from any mayonnaise ad was not a musician walking around invading people’s personal spaces, forcing mayonnaise into people’s mouths and sandwiches. The lyrics also appear to be flat, creepy and unrelated to mayonnaise one-liners — “I live in the wall” or “sometimes I wonder who my parents are.”
Hyundai’s Palisade
“Every time I drive [a Hyundai], I feel like I’m in a movie.” You just showcased an actor plopping onto the roof of a car then rolling onto your windshield and the driver screaming. Where’s the merit in that? I think you have your messaging entirely wrong. That’s not actually what I would want as a driver.
Amazon’s Alexa+
Of the artificial intelligence oriented ads, Google’s Gemini shows how decision making will slowly become dependent on AI, and Genspark’s and OpenAI’s imply we’ll all lose our jobs to AI. Alexa+ is the only that made it to this list because it exacerbates the worst of all possibilities — a home-based AI controlled bot that can kill you if things go wrong.
The Good
United Airlines x Starlink
To be completely fair, Super Bowl ads (and ads in general) are hard to get right. You should use catchy phrases. Oh, wait — be careful with being overly cringy. What about the casting? Will we have enough money? Or time? But nothing stood out about this one, in a good way. Among the 66 Super Bowl commercials I watched for this article, this was one of the few I didn’t immediately roll my eyes at. That’s a solid start.
Fanatics Sportbook
Let’s be very clear: I’m entirely against sports betting. But man, did I love this ad. With witty jokes backing a dummy-proof analogy by Kendall Jenner explaining what Fanatics is, the commercial gave me flashbacks to “The Big Short,” which similarly borrowed celebrities to help explain unintuitive concepts related to the 2008 mortgage crash. Unfortunately, unlike how the promotion portrays sports betting, not all people make it out rich. Be careful out there.
Ring’s Search Party
The way in which we’ve always dealt with lost pets are thus far static — pictures of the pet’s face, description and the owners’ phone number listed on a sheet of paper, altogether slapped onto a local electrical pole. But Ring’s ad provides an innovative solution right before us. This ad (and product) deserves more attention.
Oikos
Many Super Bowl commercials are intentionally chaotic to capture your attention, but end up too messy as a result (to name a few: Kellogg’s Raisin Bran, Kinder Bueno, Salesforce’s Slack). This one balances the chaos just right: punchy jokes coupled with a hilariously dramatized display of the strength one gets from an Oikos drink (an actor pushes a stuck San Francisco trolley uphill, then, as if that’s not enough, ends up chucking it directly onto the rails, restoring order to the cart).
Hims & Hers
Right as they unleashed claims about the potential of their app in helping close the poverty gap in healthcare or having the ability to show early onset of cancer through a blood test, I was sold. Nevertheless, as someone who is currently reading “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou — a book detailing the behind-the-scenes of the infamous startup Theranos — I inevitably threw an eyebrow or two. Still, I found this ad (mostly) convincing.
