Super Bowl Psychology 2025

It’s football games like last Sunday’s Super Bowl that affirm my decision to never bet on sports. I’m not sure many people expected the Philadelphia Eagles to brutalize the returning champion Kansas City Chiefs. If you missed the game, it was lopsided from the start, with the Eagles putting up 34 points before the Chiefs could score once. It’s enough to make this Pittsburgh Steelers fan chant “Go Birds” in admiration. They truly are a complete and excellent football program.

Sports analysts will be talking about this game for some time, and the same can be said for the cultural commentary surrounding the advertisements played during breaks. This is the sixth installment of Super Bowl Psychology, my annual review of those advertisements, and an analysis of what they say about our wider culture. The thesis is pretty basic: if a company is going to spend millions of dollars to purchase a thirty-second ad spot in the big game, they’re going to spend a lot of time learning about their target audience. That audience is roughly 126 million Americans, more than half of all 18+ year olds in the country. Given that this year, the cost of the ads went up from seven million dollars to eight million dollars, advertising agencies have a major financial incentive to speak to what’s on everyone’s hearts and minds.

To that end, here are three trends from this year’s batch of roughly sixty Super Bowl ads and what insights they offer on the state of the nation. Ignore the political pollsters and betting markets: here, on full display, are all the insights we need to understand ourselves, our neighbors, and the wider zeitgeist (which, according to Tubi, is always changing).

Silver Hair Celebs

Every year has Super Bowl spots featuring celebrities, but what makes this year’s batch of ads unique is the number of celebs with silver hair. Perhaps it’s the target audience, or perhaps it’s the lack of common media experiences for Gen Z, but the celebs in this year’s Super Bowl ads have been known and loved for a long time. Antonio Banderas promotes Bosh. Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan reenacted the famous scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989!) for Hellmann’s Mayo. Harrison Ford joked about his last name to sell Jeeps, a joke that made me laugh audibly because I didn’t see it coming. A group of wild grannies parties without worry because WeatherTech mats are protecting the floor of their car. You know that we’re talking about demographic realities when one of the most talked about ads from the big game is Katherine O’Hara and Willem Dafoe hustling youngsters for Michelob Ultra on the pickleball court. Talk about an ascendent sport!

In past versions of this article, the theme of aging has come up a number of times. There have been plenty of commercials that have highlighted the passage of time. Some that come to mind: Google helping a grandpa store memories of his dead wife as he loses his own memories in late age, another grandpa watching his daughter figure skate since he was too old to attend her recital, aging musicians telling corporate suits to stop calling themselves “rock stars.” These gray hairs, despite their age, are having a blast, enjoying life, and razzing the youngsters along the way. It’s more than nostalgia: it’s a word of hope that getting old ain’t so bad.

Stop Trying to Make Fetch AI Happen

Lots of commercials this year touted Artificial Intelligence components of digital products. Here’s the list: Google, GoDaddy, OpenAI, Meta, and Salesforce. Frankly, I considered all the advertisements among the duds, with one exception.

Salesforce, for example, had Matthew McConaughey dashing madcap across an airport and sitting soaked in the rain dining alfresco because he didn’t have AI to help him. I have never had a madcap airport experience dashing from gate to gate. I have never been (absurdly) forced to sit outside to dine in a rainstorm. AI is trying to solve a problem that I have never had.

Google shows a family signage company using its Gemini AI to come up with sign ideas for a ’50s style diner. Therein lies the problem: not only is using AI for design projects morally dubious (since the AI has been trained off the work of all other published designers online), but also, if the company can’t come up with a design without AI helping it, it’s probably not a company worth using.

Meta’s pair of adverts for its AI-infused Ray-Bans feature a pair of dultish celebs (Chris Pratt and Chris Hemsworth) accidentally destroying art. They look quite handsome in their glasses, but the fact that they are literally destroying works of art, when the chief criticism of generative AI is that it destroys art, is as tone deaf as it gets.

The problem with selling AI is that companies can’t seem to sell it without making its users look stupid. I’m a pretty normal dude, and I have not been presented with a problem that AI would solve. Much like the adverts from previous years that did their best to sell us on cryptocurrency, my hope is that these adverts are a flash in the pan that we don’t see in future years ahead. Or, at minimum, the big tech companies put together a problem that AI is capable of solving. It’s enough that the Cirkul advertisement even lampooned AI in its advert, ordering too water bottles when Adam Devine misspeaks into his phone.

The one exception to these adverts is, of course, the incredible pun that is Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses … for your noggin. If an AI prompt came up with that incredible pun, I may change my tone, but my bet is that some very creative copywriter had a brilliant pitch on Madison Avenue, and they deserve a raise. I would buy a pair immediately if they weren’t selling for $150 a pop.

Body Talk

More than anything, this year’s batch of Super Bowl commercials featured a lot of weird body stuff. It was unnerving, to say the least, to watch the human body take center stage in bizarre and twisted ways.

Some of the tamer commercials involved not one, but two bits about flying facial hair from Pringles and Little Caesars. Dove struck a chord about body positivity, repeating its Super Bowl theme of little girls growing up to hate their bodies. Pfizer had a winner promising to knock out cancer with their little kid boxer advert. At least, in these ads, the focus was on obvious silliness and healthy and normal bodies doing what we hope bodies do.

And then, we get into the provocative advertisements. Hims and Hers goes full on conspiracy theory about obesity in America. Novartis wants women viewers to get screened for breast cancer, and to get our attention, they show thirty-seven seconds of women’s chests in gyration. Poppi brand low-sugar fizzy drinks featured women agonizing over their desire to drink a soda, an ad that seems to go out of its way to say, “We’re talking about body image issues but we’re trying really hard not to talk about body image issues.”

And then, we get to the straight up body horror commercials. British artist Seal, as an anthropomorphic seal, kisses a lime instead of a rose for Mountain Dew. Coffee Mate makes a guy’s tongue dance. The guy with a head shaped like a cowboy hat in the Tubi commercial. My corner of social media was full of descriptors like “Cronenburgian” and “Lynchian” to describe the contortions and confusions these ads presented. Still, we paid attention, didn’t we?

In recent years, Super Bowl ads have kept the body talk to a minimum. Health and fitness and body image were as far as the adverts chose to go. This year, the adverts really leaned into our discomfort with our bodies. Giant fleshy cowboy hat guy lives with the discomfort that he doesn’t belong in a world that loves fantasies, crime dramas, pirates, or vampires. Hims and Hers blames obesity on corporations profiting off of snacks and drugs. In a time when MAHA is considered to be a major political movement, and when GLP-1 drugs have changed our relationship to our bodies, we shouldn’t be surprised to see that anxiety sneak its way into a social event defined by junk food excess. After all, as Uber Eats, Matthew McConaughey and Greta Gerwig remind us, football was invented to sell us food.

The Gnostic Super Bowl

Last year’s Super Bowl ads were stuck in a bit of a rut. They were formulaic and overlapped too much in their themes and celebrity choices. The Madison Avenue executives read the same reports and played the same hand, so nothing really stood out as excellent or terrible. A little nostalgia, a popular non-offensive celebrity, a couple of jokes, and voila! a Super Bowl commercial is born. One ad exec called it the “super-ficial bowl.”

One year later, in February 2025, we’re getting whiplash. No longer stuck in a rut, we are coming to terms with the fact that we are embodied creatures, made of skin and stomachs and fat and keratin. We are denying that we get old and get cancer and die. We proclaim body positivity on the one hand and shame people for drinking pop on the other. Artificial Intelligence is highlighting how we cannot divorce our minds from our muscles and skeletons and appetites. Depending on who you ask, the pharmaceutical companies are either going to cure cancer or overcharge us for their version of Ozempic. We insist that aging isn’t so bad, with the joys of grey hair and life experience opening up doors to expertise and winning. Winning, that is, as long as our bodies remain sexy and athletic into our sixties and seventies, so we’d better check for lumps with regularity. The body horror that snags our attention is so potent because it plays on our own fears of how our bodies aren’t properly functioning, or how our bodies don’t align with what we desire for ourselves. We wonder if it’s actually possible that coffee creamer tastes like that advert says it does, or whether the mayonnaise triggers that famous Megan Ryan psychosexual joy. We cringe at the Seal seal as it looks so familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

The ancient Romans and Greeks had lots of hang-ups about their bodies. One Christian variation of that anxiety, called Gnosticism, promised its followers transcendence from the dirty, material limitations of the body through special, secret knowledge that could only be obtained by deep and undivided devotion. Call it the Gnostic Super Bowl, the year when our ads seemed specifically designed to speak to a culture unsure of how to reconcile its biological half.

So where might we go in our collection of Super Bowl advertisements to discover a brand that loves and cares about the body, that understands its limits and offers us care and consolation in the midst of our mortality? That would be to Angel Soft toilet paper, of course, whose meta commercial offering viewers a thirty second bathroom break was, in my esteem, the best ad of the night. To love and care for the embodied human is to offer understanding and relief, to allay fears of disfunction and death and acknowledge physiological reality. And in this niche instance of Super Bowl commercials, that means something as simple as taking a pee break before the halftime show. “It’s simple. Don’t watch this. You there — get off the couch and go to the bathroom!” No plea for attention, no fearmongering, no tear-jerking cinematic mini-movie, no celebrities, no gimmicks: just permission to go and be human in all its frailty and limitation.

Strays:

• Tom Brady was on the TV all night long, whether we wanted him to be or not. Not only did he appear in at least three different adverts, but he also had to do a lot of color commentary to keep things interesting as the Chiefs got destroyed. My favorite part of Brady’s involvement, however, was his discussion about losing the 2007 Super Bowl to the New York Giants, a famous loss that echoed what star quarterback Patrick Mahomes was experiencing in real time on that field. Excellence in athleticism, it turns out, makes the losses that much harder, even if we think these players have it all together.
• I’m normally a fan of the He Gets Us ads, and this year’s was fine: Johnny Cash singing Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” over small time “acts of greatness.” My only critique? It wasn’t quite as countercultural as previous years. The power of the campaign is its counterculture, but first responders, overcoming racism, organ donation, and pushing cars out of snow are culturally accepted definitions of what is “great.” It’s not exactly wrong or bad — it just lacked bite. I hope people connect with it even if it wasn’t as powerful a statement as it was in previous years.
• Other trends to take note of: The storytelling cinematic ads are back, and for the most part, they were fine. Classic Rock tunes were used in a lot of music beds this year, often paired with some of the “girl power” ads. Also, some of the comic heavy commercials played things really tame, given especially how boundary-pushing the comedians can be. And there was less nostalgia too, or at least, it wasn’t so obvious or pandering.
• Speaking of comedians, it’s a big risk for Totino’s to get Tim Robinson to do an ad with them, but to be fair, I do think a lot of Tim Robinson fans eat Totino’s.
• I kind of hate that Tubi’s ad was so awful, because I watched the second half of the Super Bowl on Tubi, and it was great. No glitches, no issues … but the ad was so bad, I don’t feel like I should watch Tubi any more out of protest!