Super Bowl LVI capped off a run of of thrilling, nail-biting NFL playoff games, with the championship only decided in the last minute of the fourth quarter. (Congratulations to the Los Angeles Rams for winning the Vince Lombardi Trophy.) But unlike the certainty that a final score confers on the last team standing on the football field, nothing is nearly as cut and dried for regular observers of the Big Game's commercials on our screens.
Still, Jorge Prado, co-founder of Admazing Co., raved, "This year's Super Bowl ads were a fantastic return to what consumers expected with a blend of humor, celebrity, and nostalgia. While a few were pre-released, the anticipation of new work was surprisingly delightful."
Others were more sanguine, although still positive: "Overall, I felt there was a quality to the creative of this year’s spots that was lacking in recent years," said Julia St. Onge-May, Night After Night's group bsiness director. "I laughed, I teared up, I said “that one was smart” to myself a couple of times. I was entertained."
As is true every year, there were ads that were universally loved, some that were widely panned, some that elicited equally strong reactions on either end of the spectrum and perhaps more than a few that fell somewhere between whatever and meh.
If the state of our culture could be quantified by watching this year's ads, you'd think that after everyone converted their money into cryptocurrency, they'd head to the local car dealer to buy an electric vehicle, and on the drive home they'd groove to a Gen X-approved playlist (and with whatever spare bitcoins they had left, they'd place bets on any of the suddenly ubiquitous sportsbook sites).
To help us make sense of this year's slate of Super Bowl spots, we polled the Amp community for the best, the worst and the in between. Visit the Super Bowl: Special Report vertical to watch all the Super Bowl ads.
Best—and worst—ad: Coinbase, "WAGMI" (Accenture)