Move over beer and pickup trucks. At Super Bowl LX, AI became the breakout star of the ad breaks. According to early analysis from Adweek, nearly a quarter of all ads during the game referenced or leveraged AI in some way — a massive leap from past years when tech brands would quietly tuck in a logo, tagline, or hashtag before the next Doritos commercial.
This wasn’t a major shocker. Because whether you’re excited, skeptical, or outright terrified of what AI might mean for jobs, privacy, or creativity — the tech companies knew there was no avoiding the topic.
- Anthropic directly (and hilariously) jabbed at OpenAI’s in-product ads.
- Amazon poked fun at our deeply rooted fears about AI’s potential harm as it takes over our homes and lives. (Too soon, Amazon. Way too soon.)
- Google tugged on our heartstrings with a mom and her young son preparing for an upcoming move by completely designing his new room, down to the color of the walls and exact placement of the dog bed. (Meanwhile, I struggled to get Gemini to draw a taco for me this morning.)
MORE interesting than seeing AI as the subject of ads, however, was seeing it as a tool for creating ads. This year’s non-tech advertisers realized that AI isn’t just a product anymore — it’s now a shared global conversation. And marketers go wherever the cultural attention and curiosity is.
Marketers also got budgets. And with Super Bowl ad costs soaring (some 30-second spots fetched $10+ million this year), it’s no surprise that some brands chose to take a route that didn’t involve paying real actors. Smart marketers are also aware of the backlash that comes with purely AI-driven creation. Put that all together, and the creative gamble of AI-generated ads is a high-stakes one.
And so for me, the MOST interesting aspect of this year’s Super Bowl ads was the emergence of a new commercial format:
Nostalgia + Tech = Comfortable Innovation
This formula pairs the comfort of familiar stories and/or cherished characters from our past with brand spanking new technology to help bridge the gap between unease and excitement. Almost like a marketing balm to ease the sting of automation potentially replacing human creativity. My two favorite examples from the big game:
1) Dunkin’s Super Bowl ad combined our favorite ‘80s and ’90s TV icons (uncannily de-aged) with fresh, tongue-in-cheek energy in a spoof of Good Will Hunting. The result was something warm, familiar, and retro that pointed to Dunkin’s current relevance and with-it-ness.
2) Xfinity’s Jurassic Park-inspired spot reunited actors Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and the gorgeous Jeff Goldblum (de-aged with AI or just looking fine?) to imagine a world where better wifi could have saved Spielberg’s dinosaurs. Kudos to the ad team for a cheeky surfacing of tech anxiety with a prehistoric twist.
What’s clear about these two ads is that they used real actors. What’s not clear is whether they employed AI for their actor de-aging — or just old-school hair and makeup plus some form of CGI technology. But that’s not really the point.
This blend of nostalgia to humanize technology is a clear playbook for an industry caught in a bind: Ad agencies and the brands they represent want to been seen as innovative, but don’t want to suggest that tech is replacing humans.
Whether you loved this year’s super bowl ads, laughed nervously a few times like I did, or just rolled your eyes, the bottom line is clear: AI is now a pillar of Super Bowl advertising strategy. Brands are still figuring out whether that’s fun or frightening. And whether you think it’s genius or just good old-fashioned distraction, you’ll be seeing a lot more of the nostalgia + tech ad equation.
What are your thoughts on how generative AI is changing creative work?
