This year's Super Bowl ads featured a lot of "frantic pop-culture mashups"
"Watching the Super Bowl commercials during this year’s Big Game, I thought often of (Ralph Breaks the Internet) and his desperate meme hucksterism," says Todd VanDerWerff. "They weren’t ads so much as frantic pop culture mashups, and they rarely felt like commercials for specific products but rather some notion of a capitalist society in general. Beer commercials would become Game of Thrones commercials, and NFL legends would star in what amounted to wacky sitcom versions of the league, and The Big Lebowski’s the Dude would hang out with Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw." VanDerWerff adds that this year's ads "felt less like the work of corporate marketing executives and more like they’d been blended together by some sentient algorithm that plucked a bunch of trending topics from random common Google searches. (Given the fact that several of the ads were for big tech giants like Google and Amazon, it’s entirely possible they were somewhat assembled by algorithms.)"
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Why were this year's Super Bowl ads so forgettable?
Sunday's ads were largely risk-averse, although they were more memorable than the game itself. "Why did so few brands manage to make something truly hilarious, poignant, or otherwise transcendent?" says Justin Peters. "Perhaps because the stakes are too high to take a leap: Super Bowl ads this year cost a reported $5.2 million per 30 seconds of air time. That price serves to box out smaller, less-established companies that might be eager to raise their profiles by airing a risky ad while encouraging larger companies to stick to familiar terrain: celebrity cameos, treacly sentiments, well-worn catchphrases. The post-Kaepernick P.R. problems of the NFL, too, might have sapped brands’ enthusiasm for making too big a ripple on game day."