Bayfield: I watched every Super Bowl ad and I’m depressed

Having just watched over an hour of this year’s Super Bowl ads, I feel a bit drained. And depressed. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that makes me feel so “meh”. In an attempt to organise my thoughts, I’ve narrowed it down to the following:

1: Celebrity overdose

Using a celebrity doesn’t make your ad great. Especially when you use the same celebrity as another brand. This year, Modern Families’ Sofia Vegara promoted Skechers, Boehringer Ingelheim and Telemundo. The beauty of a celebrity like Emma Stone, Matthew McConaughy, Ben Stiller and the hundred others wheeled out for the big day is that they can act, so at least the ads are watchable. But when every second spot features either a major Hollywood or NFL star, or both, how is your brand memorable? The wow factor is lessened immeasurably, and viewers are no less surprised at seeing A-listers than they would be while watching the Academy Awards.

2: Some were not good enough

So many of the spots were way too ordinary given the money spent on making them. I needed to watch multiple compilation reels before writing this piece, and rarely felt the urge to view anything twice. I get that some spots need me to be American or to live in America to understand the context. How else could a brand produce a two-and-a-half minute ad directed by Spike Jonze and starring Ben Stiller and make almost no mention of who they are or what they do? I remember the actors and the gags, but not the product.

3: What about the feels?

Almost everyone went for funny. I get that the Super Bowl audience is primarily beered-up American men, but even those guys can handle a range of tones of voice. Football is entertainment, but a moving ad can still entertain in its own way. It feels like a missed opportunity to stand out. In fact, no one seemed to want to stand out from anyone, especially the three brands starring Sofia Vegara, the three that composed a song about their product, the two that used the “rips rubber mask off face to reveal celebrity” gimmick – and the 100 that used famous people.

4: The question of efficacy

Many seemed unfussed whether I remembered them. Often, the brand was only flashed up at the end, or mentioned once. You don’t need to go as far as Wix’s dreary Powerpoint presentation, but if you’re not Uber Eats, Ritz, Skittles or Bud Lite, we need to know who you are. Just having your logo and a star actor, especially if you’re a brand that doesn’t have fifty plus years of heritage, isn’t enough. Pepsi’s polar bear ad left me – and millions of others thinking about Coke, which feels like an own goal.

I was fortunate enough to spend a month working on one of this year’s ads, which means I feel more invested in the work. In the end, they didn’t go with any of my ideas, not even the one where I suggested we used our Super Bowl budget to place hundreds of ads on all the channels that weren’t airing the game.

Super Bowl ads are an anomaly. In an age when clients prefer a social media post or an in-store activation to Chris Hemsworth or Living on a Prayer, they seem anachronistic. It wasn’t that Super Bowl 2026 was all bad. It was the opposite. They were generally above par. Some were really good.  The work I liked appealed to me because it reminded me of a time when TV ads mattered, and TV had a captive audience of millions. In an age when we subscribe to media channels to actively avoid ads, it’s almost impossible for a 30 second spot to become famous outside of Super Bowl, or to be given the budget to hire William Shatner. I recently had a major client who refused to advertise beyond staff talking about their product on Facebook, and wondered why his numbers weren’t going up.

It’s refreshing that at least somewhere, clients are still prepared to throw millions of dollars at a shot of awareness on the biggest stage in the world. And this is the real reason for my malaise. The work reminds me of when ads had big budgets all the time, when agencies flew creatives around the world, and we had the chance to work with directors who had shot movies we’d seen in the cinema. For most creatives, those days are over. It’s like expecting the luxury of Titanic on a P&O cruise. Super Bowl is not reality. We need to make meagre budgets stretch and still make brands famous without the use of a Kardashian .

It does feel that Superbowl, Christmas in the UK and the annual Aussie Lamb extravaganza are the last dance for the classic TVC, and I watch these spots in the same way I look at video of my almost adult daughter when she was a tiny child.

“I remember you, great TV ads”, I think, “and I loved the fun we had together.”

Super Bowl 2026 may have had its misses, but we should still cherish it.