Super Bowl Psychology, 2023: What Our Ads Say About Us

What a fantastic game last night — congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs for bringing home the Lombardi at Super Bowl 2023. Both the Chiefs and the Eagles were top notch programs this season, and the game kept me on the edge of my seat until the final few minutes. Sadly, the big story from the game will not be the Chiefs or the Eagles, but the “Zebras,” as our own Todd Brewer articulated earlier today. This year, the NFL has been plagued with officiating decisions that impacted the outcome of important games, and I’m afraid we’re going to be hearing about it until training camps start next fall.

Still, it was a fantastic game for 58 minutes, but as we say every year, the real star of the show is the commercials. My contention continues to be that nobody has a better pulse on the American psyche than the ad firms behind Super Bowl commercials. Simply put, the financial incentives for understanding the American mindset each February are in the millions (and billions?) of dollars. Getting a piece of that pie means that ad firms are going above and beyond to understand their target audience. Logically, reverse analyzing the ads played during the big game, we can have a better understanding of the times, and perhaps, a better understanding of ourselves.

To that end, here are a few themes that stand out in the 2023 Super Bowl commercials that offer insight into the (American) human tradition.

Who Let the Dogs Out? (The Baha Men)

It may be the lunar year of the rabbit, but this year’s Super Bowl advertisements proclaimed it was the year of the dog. Man’s best friend took the spotlight in many of the commercials, including the two traditional adverts I connected with the most. Amazon’s commercial about the lonely dog acting out had me going to the last second. The “Forever” campaign from The Farmer’s Dog was a tour de force and a work of art. I’m not kidding in the least — rarely have I seen such a stunning meditation on love, loss, and mortality in any form, much less television advertisements. 

But so many of this year’s commercials gave dogs cameos, whether they were poodles groomed as triangles for Doritos or puppies as a status symbol for the Popeyes meme guy. Oh yeah, and allow me a short victory lap for referencing Sarah MacLauchlan in last week’s preview post — she was back this year to raise money to “shelter” animals in a beer ad.

It wasn’t just animals in the abstract this year: dogs are a unique stand-in for unconditional love and innocence. They’ve always played a part in super bowl ads, but this year was different. Consider our heart strings tugged.

Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge, Say No More. (Monty Python)

Another theme in this year’s commercial broadcast was what we might call “the meta commercial.” Which is to say, ad firms frequently broke the fourth wall to buddy up to consumers and assure them: yes, we know this is a commercial. We know that you know this is a commercial. We know that you know that we know this is a commercial. We have, however, entertained you over these 30 seconds or so, so please consider our product.

The chief example that comes to mind is the “Blue Moon” beer commercial, a Dadaist wire-frame kung fu bar fight between Miller and Coors that ends abruptly with a pitch for a third beer brand. But also, Steve Martin and Ben Stiller dare us to guess whether they’re acting when they drink and enjoy Pepsi zero. And not only do we get to see a nonsensically dramatic Adam Driver learn about “a website that makes websites,” we get a second behind-the-scenes commercial with multiple Adam Drivers doing reality cam interviews. 

Should we call it the deconstruction of a Super Bowl commercial? An attempt to subvert the genre, or maybe even destroy it? A relational triangle that tries to respect the savvy viewer’s consumption habits? An absence of meaning and an embrace of nihilism packaged in a sixty-second ad buy? These seemed to be the least impactful adverts in the evening.

It’s All About the Benjamins Millennials.

Continuing the trend from last year, this year’s Super Bowl keyed in on the millennial demographic, which is roughly the generation aged 27-42. The celebrities focused on this generation of consumers, as did the pop culture references and music. The 80’s and 90’s continue to be the sweet spots for nostalgia, from Caddyshack to Clueless to P Diddy’s Uber One-Hit-Wonder parade. 

Perhaps no commercial emphasized this so glaringly as the rock star commercial, which is my contender for worst commercial of the evening. A bunch of aging musicians like Joan Jett and Ozzy Osborne don eyeliner and tell bland corporate workers to stop calling themselves “rockstars.” I don’t think the commercial was in on its own irony that these aging musicians were shells of the rock stars they used to be. How disingenuous for them to become gatekeepers when they themselves have lost rockstar status. 

Contrast this with the Popcorners Breaking Bad advertisement, which many consider to be the best advert of the evening. (It was definitely a top 5 ad for me!). You’ll remember in 2015 that millennials loved Breaking Bad so much, they created a run on used Pontiac Azteks, driving up the price of an otherwise mediocre automobile. Not only did they bring back Mr. Walter and Jesse, but they went the extra mile to bring back Tuco Salamanca as well. The nostalgia was so potent it might as well have been manufactured by Heisenberg himself.

As Lora Kelly wrote in the New York Times: “The future is uncertain. The present is complex. But the past? That’s pretty safe terrain for Super Bowl advertisers.”

Also, Millennials love dogs. See above.

Despite cameos by artists from other generations, like Elton John for the Boomers or YouTuber Mr. Beast for Gen Z, the ad companies definitely think I, a millennial, have money to spend and want their share of it. If only they knew I was more like Binky Dad than Cher Horowitz, they might not be quite so eager to reach me.

#HeGetsUs and the Serious Ads.

I shared most of my thoughts on the “He Gets Us” campaign last week in advance of the broadcast. I’ll only share here that I appreciated that the campaign took two different directions with their advertising, one emphasizing Jesus’s teaching to become little children, the other emphasizing Jesus loving his (and by proxy, our) enemies.

Make no mistake — the ads themselves are polarizing. Just this morning, something like 20,000 Redditors joined in with a prominent US Senator to claim that the ads supported fascist ideologies. Slate called the advert “Ambiguously Evil.” But then again, nobody liked it when Jesus first said it either. Here’s hoping (and here’s praying) that this ancient word of law brings about repentance, not just rebellion. 

Truthfully, outside of #HeGetsUs, Madison Avenue didn’t bring the cinematic, patriotic, gritty, black-and-white sophisticated ads that were featured in previous years. No “meeting in the middle,” from Bruce Springsteen, and no “its’ half-time in America” from Clint Eastwood. I think “He Gets Us” fills that gap as a serious reflection on the state of American anger. 

A Return to Innocence (Enigma, 1994)

Putting it all together, this year’s batch of Super Bowl advertisements were, to quote the 1994 new age anthem by Enigma, a “return to innocence.” Not only did advertisers harken back to better days and doggie love, but there was no mention of COVID during the entirety of the broadcast. Nobody leaned on social activism as advertising, and the crypto-fads that dominated last year were absent in light of the cryptocurrency market crash. Most commercials leaned on humor, love, dogs, and nostalgia, or tried to break down the fourth wall and “authentically” pitch us with a meta-ad.

I didn’t care for the Avocados commercial that riffed off the Adam and Eve story — there were not enough ugly nude people in that commercial to reflect what Eden would really be like in 2023. It was, however, emblematic of America’s psyche this year. The Avocado has been eaten, and things are better. America isn’t perfect by any stretch, but the panic and existential crisis of the past years has receded for a season. It was the most “normal” Super Bowl set of advertisements to come around in years, a throwback to an earlier era where the stage was less about statements and cinema, but more about the traditional mix of commercialism and fun.

Strays:

• Two commercials this year about Boston from Sam Adams and Dunkin. I guess Boston needs something else to be proud about now that the Patriots are irrelevant? (Zing!)
• Two commercials with Serena Williams as well. Maybe I should have written about adverts with dogs and GOATS? (rimshot)
• Rihanna’s halftime show had mesmerizing stage design and perfect cinematography — frankly, I was blown away. Seriously, the half-time-show bar has never been higher. I also appreciated how Rihanna embraced her pregnancy and kept her part of the performance in lower gear. Let the other dancers do the physical stuff; Rihanna can keep it chill, sing, and be regal. The last thing America’s pregnant women need is a high powered pop star showing them that if they, too, worked hard enough, they could pull off a high-octane dance routine on America’s biggest stage. 
• Never ever gonna subscribe to Tubi after making party hosts across the nation scramble for their remotes in panic after faking a settings screen as a part of their ad. Also, the rabbit hole ads were creepy.
• In many larger media markets, viewers were treated to a Church of Scientology advertisement. Their enjoiner that “the power is inside you” to “stand up on your two feet and rise up from any defeat” was in total conflict with the #HeGetsUs admonition to love our enemies. As it should be: may the two worldviews never be confused for one another.