Super Bowl Commercials And American Society
How our most expensive advertisements describe national economic life
For massive companies in just about every industry, their marketing teams, and the advertising agencies they employ, the Super Bowl is like the Super Bowl. The biggest annual stage to make their pitch in commercial form. Millions of dollars and thousands of thought hours are poured into ideation and production, millions more to buy the spot. Teasers are released, prescreenings are scheduled, watch parties are gathered.
These commercials are almost all terrible, but they do serve as a unique pulse check on American economic society. The balance of ascendant and established and dwindling industries, public taste (or marketers’ perception of it), the stylistic Overton window, and various celebrities’ states of desperation all become visible over a four hour television spectacle, only a quarter of which is composed of the actual playing of football.
A Super Bowl commercial was not always so revered. They’ve always attracted industries with the highest projected margins and degrees of consumer relevance, but until Apple’s 1984 ad introducing the Macintosh personal computer few people realized that they could reshape the national narrative about a company.
This new soft power of the Super Bowl ad slot made it especially attractive to companies in industries experiencing intense growth and competition. Apart from the companies whose cultural associations with the sport (rather than any growth narrative) obligate their appearance, it is fluid and emerging industries that invest most aggressively in airtime. These companies are not just trying to sell you their product, but pitching themselves as a staple in American Life.
All this to say: we can get a real sense of the American commercial landscape writ large by paying attention to Super Bowl ads. In them, the economy comes right out and announces where it is heading, and what it has to sell us to get there.
A look back at Super Bowl advertising in the 21st century bears this out. Until about 2012, Super Bowl ads were dominated by mass market consumables (like beer, soft drinks, fast food, snacks), car companies, and movie studios, with dot-com and early telecom ads crowding out anything related to manufacturing starting in 2008.
Around 2012 tech platforms and app-based services start to swallow more share. Google’s first Super Bowl ad came in 2010, but Microsoft, Squarespace, and TurboTax all aired their firsts in 2014. The balance shifts away from hard goods toward specialized and individualized technology and digital infrastructure. Digital fluency was increasingly assumed of the audience. In-person retail was replaced by e-commerce.
In 2019 comes speculative tech and finance. 2022 is remembered as the Crypto Bowl. Cryptocurrency exchanges, fintech startups, online investment platforms, and sports gambling all begin to take more space. Only a sliver of these services survived the market correction, but their vacuum was quickly filled by growing AI, health and pharmaceutical, and delivery service buyers.
And it was basically these players that dominated 2026’s Super Bowl: tech (AI specifically), health, and mobile services (like food delivery and gambling). As always, some traditional consumer goods make an appearance. Budweiser had their slot, and so did Ritz. But again, the role of these ads is more ceremonial than it is commercial, and their share is trending downward.
The story of the American economy’s last two decades is written into these changing proportions. While the US hasn’t really been a manufacturing economy since the 1970s, the precipitous decline of manufacturing output between 2000 and 2008, as well as what replaced this value in the GDP pie, is reflected in the ads. An economy built on the purchase of goods and services in physical space is replaced by a new digital economy mediated by virtual platforms. Material infrastructure is replaced by digital infrastructure. More and more life happens in virtual space. Hard goods, replaced by software, replaced by algorithms.
A happy consequence (supposedly) of these developments is that more power is placed in the hands of the individual. If the commercials of the 2026 Super Bowl suggest anything, it is that we are incredibly empowered. The power to control our finances, to enrich ourselves through gambling, to complete our daily work tasks with the click of a button, to avoid the grocery store, to be thin, to perfect our bodies and relieve our minds1; all of it available to the contemporary NFL fan for a reasonable monthly subscription.
The operative narrative contained in most contemporary tech companies’ marketing is an empowerment one. This makes sense. These are, potentially, very powerful technologies. Where that power ends up is less clear. Is it truly the worker, for instance, who stands to gain from an agentic AI that can do most of their job for them? Or the patient, from ready and easy access to pharmaceuticals?
The styles of the commercials, like their narratives, are designed to obscure the crux of what they are actually communicating. So it is not surprising that intensely virtual technologies chose (repeatedly) to convey their product with film grain in a 4:3 aspect ratio. The warm nostalgia and artificial humanness of this aesthetic was all over 2026’s Super Bowl ads, and may or may not have successfully anesthetized consumers to the implications of a technology that would allow them to sit at their desk eating apples all day.
There is also the endemic blight of anti-advertising. Not to go “Television and U.S. Fiction” mode, but safe to say that companies are still convinced that ironic self-awareness is the way into the hearts and minds of the money-spending public. That, and de-aged celebrities, references to old intellectual property, people injuring themselves, and a blatant obfuscation of what the product they are selling actually is.
A dogmatic commitment to these strategies led to many commercials on Sunday that declined making any sense at all. This is likely because (as big as the price tags are) Super Bowl ads are less about money than ever. Much more scarce than our dollars is our attention. These ad breaks represent the single largest block of collective attention still available in an American annum. Most companies believe the most valuable use of this attention is the creation of viral moments. Primarily, what we saw in 2026 were not advertisements, but a handful of moments proffered as virality candidates, strung together in a structure vaguely resembling a commercial. It seems to me that this strategy did not succeed. Nobody really liked the ads this year.
Written by Noah Jordan (@nnoahaonn)
An interesting inversion of the WALL-E thesis which depicts future humans in a state of physical decay and avid mental activity, it increasingly appears that the archetypical subject of our own technological future will be a perfected body attached to a completely atrophied mind.