The Realness of the Super Bowl Half Time Show VS the Dystopian Nature of the Ads

I thought Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half time show was amazing and judging by the overly positive response on my timeline (I follow good people), it really captured the feeling of many Americans right now. Even for those of us who aren’t Puerto Rican, it showed the power of community, culture, identity, pride and joy. Usually, dancers in the half time show are all dressed in uniform, barely indistinguishable from one another, designed to show formations from afar rather than individuals. Whereas, Bad Bunny’s performance had everyone dressed in their own style and color palette, often doing their own thing, close-up and personal. I loved that there were so many moments highlighting individuals, like the Puerto Rican social club owner, the couple who got married (for real!) and the little boy watching the Grammy’s. Even though Bad Bunny was highlighting culture in Puerto Rico and Latin American countries, I still felt a sense of personal pride. This is my America too and despite what the current administration might believe, it’s the diversity of our people that make it so special.

Let’s contrast that realness and community to the Super Bowl ads, which were all about AI (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Genspark), sports gambling (DraftKings, Fanatics), and Crypto (Coinbase). Obviously, I am not the target audience for the Super Bowl, but I swear, I have never felt more at odds with the advertisers. Is this what Americans really want? Virtual robot friends who do all their thinking for them, so they can spend their time betting on minutia with crypto currency? While they Instacart their groceries and Uber Eats their dinners so they never have to interact with humans outside their house? (Well, I’m on board with those last two.) The ads felt cold and dystopian especially in comparison to handcrafted sets and real life human beings displayed in the half time show.

Even the ad that made fun of AI was an ad for AI— a company called Claude that is directly competing with Chat GPT. Ironically, it was selling itself as an AI platform devoid of ads.

There were also lots of ads clearly generated by AI, like the Svedka vodka ad, which had me questioning to whom exactly they were selling. A party of robots? Is this what we want from a product that we usually drink to lower our inhibitions in social environments? Were the polar bears in the Pepsi commercial AI or was that CGI? How about the eagle in the Budweiser commercial? Or the snake in the Alexa ad? Who knows, it’s all becoming the same to me.

I was even questioning the celebrities in the ads, who seemed to be present in abundance. Ben Affleck, Ben Stiller, Kendall Jenner, George Clooney, Emma Stone, Bradley Cooper… Were they really there though? Like that ad for Dunkin. Did anyone actually come onto set to act in that ad? Or did they just agree that Dunkin could use their likenesses?

Yep, I don’t know. And that’s just an obvious one. What about Jeff Goldblum and Heidi Gardner in their Homes.com ad which put them in various extreme settings like an airport runway, a space shuttle and a desert? I used to think ads like this involved art direction and green screens, but now I’m wondering if it was just a few well written prompts. Were they even in the same room together? I’m not convinced. I actually saw an ad with Jen Aniston and Jason Bateman recently, which had me asking the same question. Jason’s hair had a weird edge to it and I found myself rewatching frame by frame to figure out if they were ever in the shot together, and when they were, I thought maybe it was Frankensteined together. Then I had a scarier thought, did they actually film this at all? I mean, we’ve all seen the deep fake Tom Cruise guy and what they can do with politicians.

I mean clearly, everyone from Chris Hemsworth to Matthew Broderick has no problem making an ad for an AI company (despite actors complaining that AI is ruining their industry), so who’s to say they wouldn’t hand over their likeness for a work-free paycheck?

Now, I might be taking this all a little far. Perhaps all these actors showed up, worked together in a room and there is a lot less tech involved than I am imagining, but the point is— I really don’t know. I can’t tell and now I’m suspicious of everything.

As a former advertising creative, the whole thing made me sad. Yes, the ideas and storytelling are still there, but half of the creativity of the Super Bowl ads is the ability of the production teams to pull it off within the budget. You used to have to think practically about how to make Jeff Goldblum look like he was in a desert and a second later in space. Did you have the budget to fly to multiple locations? Or could your art directors and set designers and lighting technicians and cameramen succeed in making it all look real in a studio? If you spent half your money on Jeff Goldblum, you’d have to sacrifice in another area and get creative. But no more. Anything is possible, and therefore, nothing is impressive.

Once upon a time, back when I was a creative director in advertising, I made an ad for peanut butter Oreos. Our concept was that a kid in the stands at the circus was eating peanut butter Oreos and a baby elephant who was performing in the center ring, saw the Oreos, walked over to the kid (stopping the circus in the process) and demanded the Oreo with his trunk. To shoot that ad, we flew to South Africa, built an entire circus set and trained an actual elephant to walk across the set and raise his trunk to make it look like he was asking for the Oreo. We pulled it off and seeing our idea come to life in such a major way was absolutely magical. Now, I get that using live elephants in an ad today would be seen as unethical (this was 20 years ago and my thoughts have evolved on this topic) but is that ad nearly as good as AI output from a prompt? Nope. A big part of the fun for the audience is thinking— how did they do that? It wouldn’t give me nearly the same kind of satisfaction as a creative either.

Now let’s go back to the Super Bowl Half time show. In addition to Bad Bunny’s message, do you know what I keep seeing people obsess over online?

The plants.

Originally, when the set up started and everyone realized there were people in the plants, most of us thought the plants were going to dance. And then when we realized that wasn’t part of the plan, it somehow became even more impressive. Some genius in production figured out that the easiest way to move and change the set as Bad Bunny navigated the field in real time was to put people in the plants. The people were faster and more efficient than anything they could have been done mechanically. It wasn’t spectacle, it was practical. And that realization was better than any single ad effect I saw during the commercials.

If there is anyone who works for one of these ad agencies reading, who is looking for proof that people don’t want AI, look at our love for the plants.

What did you think of the half time show? How about the ads? Tell me in the comments!