At a time when cable television advertising is quickly being pushed aside in favor of streaming or social media ads, the Super Bowl still reigns supreme as a marketing powerhouse for major corporations hoping to capitalize on the over 100 million viewers. While some advertisements this year relied on a star-studded 30 seconds of human creativity, heartfelt messages or comedy, others chose to place AI under the spotlight — and viewers noticed.
Some of the most well-received ads of Super Bowl LX came from brands like Pepsi, Lay’s, Dunkin’ Donuts and Michelob Ultra. All their ads featured the type of creative, audience-gripping content that the Super Bowl has been praised for in previous years.
Pepsi’s ad, “The Choice,” featured a CGI-animated polar bear, the mascot of rival company Coca-Cola, struggling to cope with the idea that he preferred Pepsi in a blind taste test. This comedy-forward ad, directed by Taika Waititi, chose to focus on human-made CGI rather than the heavily AI-focused advertisements that their main competitor has focused on over the past holiday season.
Lay’s brought a heartwarming father-daughter relationship front and center for “Last Harvest,” its major ad of the game. Based on a true story of real Lay’s potato farmers, the ad mixed the classic Americana feeling of country and family with traditional storytelling, depicting an aging farmer reflecting on his life with his now-grown daughter as he passes the family business to her.
Dunkin’ Donuts’ ad, “Good Will Dunkin’,” was another fan-favorite this year, offering a fun and nostalgic ‘90s-feeling “lost pilot” of a faux-sitcom. The title is a play off the film “Good Will Hunting” and features a stacked cast of celebrities, including Ben Affleck, Tom Brady, Jennifer Anniston and Matt LeBlanc situated in a 1995 Dunkin’ Donuts in Boston.
The ad leaned into the current increase in nostalgia trends seen widely across social media, tying Dunkin’s brand identity with television fan-favorites like “Friends” and “Seinfeld.” While some critics were rubbed the wrong way by the harsh digital de-aging done on the actors to make them appear as they had in the 90s, the reception from audiences was overwhelmingly positive on social media.
Another popular commercial from Super Bowl LX was Michelob Ultra’s “The ULTRA Instructor.” Partnered with the 2026 Winter Olympics, this ski-resort-centered ad got much of its attention from Kurt Russel’s performance as the titular “Ultra Instructor,” with him teaching a novice skier, played by Lewis Pullman, how to beat his friends out on the slopes to earn a beer.
The engaging visuals, cast and traditional storytelling present in all of these advertisements felt significant to viewers and placed them among the most popular to run during the game. However, AI-heavy commercials, specifically from Svedka, Amazon and Meta, certainly garnered a different type of attention. Social media users felt that a heavy presence of AI removed human creativity, dampened emotional impact and provided unsettling and sometimes uncanny visuals.
Svedka’s vodka ad, “Shake Your Bots Off,” was by far one of the most talked about advertisements of the Super Bowl this year. The ad contained fully AI-generated robots dancing and drinking in a club setting to the song “Super Freak” by Rick James. As a commercial, viewers felt it featured little substance with uncomfortable and inconsistent visuals of Svedka’s mascots, “FemBot” and “BroBot.” Some social media users described it as “possibly the worst Super Bowl ad of all time.”
In a time where there is still plenty of discomfort with AI visuals in media, why do brands insist on using them? It all comes down to the universal motivator: money.
Companies spent an average of $8 million per 30 seconds of advertisement space in this year’s Super Bowl. Because AI advertisements are reported to be both faster and much cheaper to produce than traditional, fully human-made works, application into the Super Bowl space would mean millions of dollars saved for companies looking to maximize profits.
While the future of AI presence in advertising is still uncertain, the overwhelming prevalence of artificial intelligence in this year’s Super Bowl LX shows its marketing applications are likely here to stay, at least in some capacity. While audiences tend to respond better to authentic human-driven works without visually present AI, its cost-cutting power may still cause brands to ignore customer preferences and flood the market with generated content.
For all future Super Bowls, companies will have to decide between seemingly negative audience responses for lower upfront costs, or between high costs but consumer upside associated with the traditional human-made ad.
