Column: The TV ad is a dying art. This year’s Super Bowl proved it

Has video killed the Super Bowl ad?

If ever there were a Super Bowl that needed a bunch of surprising, cool and smartly written commercials, it was Super Bowl LIX. As Philadelphia systematically destroyed Kansas City on Sunday, Eagles fans were no doubt too … ebullient to pay much attention to the ads, while Chiefs supporters no doubt spent the commercial breaks bargaining with God or dousing themselves with Arthur Bryant‘s Barbecue Sauce for luck.

For the rest of us, well, let’s just say it would have been nice to find some distraction from a really funny and/or powerful ad or two.

Alas, it was not to be. With a few notable exceptions — Nike’s “So Win” spot, which pushed back against the “no win” situation in which female athletes are often trapped, was terrific, as was Kieran Culkin’s sassy voice work as a beluga whale for Nerdwallet — this year’s Super Bowl commercials did not live up to the hype.

And that hype may be part of the problem.

In the last two decades, Super Bowl commercials have taken on a life of their own, competing for next-day water cooler/internet anointment as fiercely as the two teams taking the field.

Long before Taylor Swift began dating Travis Kelce, these spots became a way of drawing in nonfootball fans: Get snacks and go to the bathroom during the game, come back to catch the debut of the most expensive, and occasionally most creative, commercials on television.

Increasingly, however, it is not their debut. After the phenomenal success of Volkswagen’s 2011 “Star Wars” themed spot “The Force,” advertisers began dropping their Super Bowl ads before the big game. Media outlets, which already offered “reviews” of the spots, began providing “sneak peaks” and early best/worst rankings or lists of whom/what to watch for.

This year, you didn’t have to watch Super Bowl LIX to see Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal revisit their famous deli scene from “When Harry Met Sally” for Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, or watch Catherine O’Hara and Willem Dafoe emerge as pickleball champions for Michelob Ultra or even catch the cross-over Matt Damon/Ben Affleck joke between Dunkin’ and Stella Artois.

But the advertisers, it seems, have begun to believe their own publicity. As if the fact that they had nabbed a Super Bowl spot (or two) and a few famous faces guaranteed success.

Largely conceived and produced amid the uncertainties of an election year , many of the ads settled in the safe space of nostalgia. In addition to Ryan and Crystal‘s throwback for Hellmann‘s, Seal (as an actual and rather frightening seal) sang a modified version of his 1994 hit “Kiss From a Rose” for Mountain Dew’s Baja Blast; Instacart unleashed Mr. Clean, the Jolly Green Giant and the Kool-Aid pitcher; and 11 years after they starred in the first season of “True Detective,” Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson re-united for Agentforce.

Watching the ads play out in their intended habitat — the Super Bowl — it was difficult not to wish that the advertisers had taken their own messaging to heart. That, as in the good old days, they had worried less about multi-platform promotion of the commercial and more about making the commercial good and memorable.

Surprise certainly would have helped, particularly for the more unusual offerings — Barry Keoghan going full “Banshees of Inisherin” while pitching laptops at unsuspecting Irish folk for Squarespace, Jeremy Strong “getting into character” but submerging himself in a barrel full of wet coffee beans for Dunkin’ — but in the end, most of the spots, which sold for an average of $8 million, relied on famous faces over clever conceits and sharp writing. (Both Seal’s Mountain Dew ad and Coffee-Mate’s Cold Foam spot, which featured a contorting life-size human tongue, no doubt seemed funnier and less disturbing in the pitch meeting.)

There were so many stars — including, in addition to those mentioned above, Walton Goggins, Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford, Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, Issa Rae, Glen Powell, Adam Brody, Greta Gerwig, Nate Bargatze, Aubrey Plaza, Michael Shannon, Bad Bunny and Bill Murray — that they quickly ceased to make an impact.

Martha Stewart showed up twice (for Skechers and Uber Eats), as did McConaughey (for Uber Eats and Agentforce), though “Schitt’s Creek” was the clear winner of the Super Bowl ad war. In addition to O’Hara for Michelob Ultra, Eugene Levy and Sarah Levy showed up for Little Caesars and Dan Levy appeared for Homes.com. (Culkin and Strong, both Oscar nominees, made “Succession” a healthy second.)

Perhaps ironically, then, many of the most powerful ads were those without Hollywood A-listers: the NFL’s spots celebrating youth organizations and supporting women’s flag football; Dove’s “These Legs” campaign for body positivity among girls and women; Rocket.com’s paean to home and home ownership and, of course, Budweiser’s annual Clydesdale-centric spot, this one featuring the little foal that could, all connected on an emotional level.

The rest mostly fell flat, at least in Super Bowl terms. Most of them weren’t bad, they just weren’t all that special. No Jeep “Groundhog Day” or “Alexa Loses Her Voice,” never mind McDonald’s iconic “The Showdown,” in which Larry Bird and Michael Jordan shoot hoops.

No doubt those who paid millions for Super Bowl spots will consider it money well spent. With linear television at an all-time low, the Super Bowl, with its average annual viewership of 100 million, is literally the biggest game in town. And with the steady collapse of broadcast networks, the television commercial is, in many ways, a dying art. (Whether the streamers revive it in any meaningful way remains to be seen.)

So perhaps it is an issue of unrealistic expectations. As the digital multitudes, professional and amateur, turn social media into a never-ending carousel of promotion, advertising — or at least the art form it became in the latter part of the 20th century — has become as splintered as the platforms on which it runs. It’s tough to remember the days in which “Got Milk?,” celebrity-studded American Express ads or Apple’s Mac vs. PC concept were touchstones of the cultural conversation, the viral TikToks of days gone by.

Still, it’s disappointing that, given the rare (and expensive) opportunity of the Super Bowl, no company managed to break through with an ad that people will be talking about for days.

Instead, we are left only with the game — and it wasn’t exactly one for the record books.