Top 1000 Super Bowl Ads
We've seen 'em all
Here are the best commercials you’ll see during the 2024 Super Bowl. They’re released earlier every year. With an estimated audience of 110,000,000 and at a cost of $6,000,000 for 30 seconds, brands want to maximize their impact. These FILMS have to be perfect. The ones we’re enjoying this year truly reflect the current American moment in an authentic way.
Join David Roth (Defector and Flaming Hydra) and I as we dissect the greats.
#1
We see an old man at a counter in a fast-food restaurant. A young employee asks what he’d like to eat. “You don’t understand,” the elderly gentleman grumbles impatiently. The camera moves around to show his face. It’s an ancient Clint Eastwood. Yay! Our first celebrity sighting in a Super Bowl ad.
“I’m here to pick up a delivery,” he says gruffly, harkening back to his dour (yet saucily romantic role) in Cry Macho, or The Mule, or jeez, who even knows, if you want to see an elderly man in transit, that’s Clint’s forte nowadays. He’s always hustling.
“Oh, ok. Which service?”
“Uber Eats,” Eastwood rasps, raising a branded insulated bag.
“Cool. Uber Eats is—”
“The Germans used to say Uber a lot,” Eastwood interrupts. “They stopped when I strangled General Wolfgang Koltermann in the Battle of Paderborn with the same hands I use to deliver these birria tacos.” Eastwood takes the food and walks away muttering “yeah.” We see him driving around during the golden hour, scouring suburban Fresno for a correct address, routinely abused by customers: “Hey bro, they didn’t tell me these trash-ass fries weren’t crinkle cut.” In a Red Lobster parking lot, he relieves himself into a Poland Spring bottle and receives notification of a tip from a prior delivery. Eastwood sighs gently. For one more day, his multi-generational family of nine will not be evicted from their 1-bedroom apartment.
#2
Open on actual footage of the upsetting chaos of January 6th at the Capitol. We’ve seen it before. Walls climbed. Structures breached. Offices soiled. A bunch of guys who look like characters that get shotgunned through big windows on Sons Of Anarchy yelling. Only this time, we see something we had not previously noticed: Bud Light. Here we learn that at just about every dust-up, the beer served as refreshment and fuel for a group of citizens that some regard as true patriots.
The guy with his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk happily guzzles a can of Bud Light, the most insane realtor in Ft. Lauderdale cheekily waltzing across a marble floor with a stolen podium has a bottle of Bud Light in his back pocket. The ad’s narrator, Jordan Peterson, marvels at his coordination. “The eternal weight of the free-thinking man,” Peterson says, seemingly near tears, “borne with remarkable grace.”
And just like that, all of the brand’s recent cultural missteps are forgiven. Fade to black, and we’re confronted with a provocative end card that nods ominously to the upcoming election. It’s an invitation. “Run it back?”
#3
Pepperidge Farm Goldfish playfully come to life in Andy Reid’s bathtub. They swim around him, giving him ideas for new offensive formations. He cannot resist eating them, though. So all the amazing plays the Goldfish came up with don’t happen in the big game. Cut to a scoreboard. Chiefs lose 63-0. On the sidelines, Reid shrugs and reaches into his shirt pocket for another goldfish. He offers a few to Taylor Swift, suddenly next to him and wearing a headset and a Chiefs windbreaker. She makes a Jim face at the camera, knowing she will be blamed for everything.
#4
Al Pacino, wearing a black suit, red dress shirt, and an enormous pashmina scarf, is alone on a darkened theatrical stage, looking at his phone. “God DAMN it,” he shouts, slamming his phone onto the table. The silence that follows is heavy with portent. The lights have come up a bit behind him, revealing the sort of humble apartment familiar from the film adaptation of Frankie And Johnny In The Clair De Lune. “This FUCKIN’ WORLD,” Pacino roars. “Don’t let ‘em cut your throat,” he continues, more urgently. “Bet $5 to get up to $350 in bonus bets back, where applicable,” he concludes. “Only with FanDuel. Make your play.” Still very much in character, he rakes his hand through his hair as a series of disclaimers and qualifications appear on the screen in 4-point type. “You can be a complete loser and still win.”
#5
Open on a close-up of Tom Cruise smiling his recognizable, slightly snaggletoothed grin. He is perspiring. His hair, gone gray, flops rhythmically; he is breathing through his nose with a severity that seems medically inadvisable.
Cruise is jumping rope. Viewers understand that this is a reprise of his role as charismatic sports agent Jerry Maguire. His smile turns to panic—he does not know where he is. We realize that Jerry Maguire now has dementia (and probably shouldn’t be jumping rope). Thankfully Ray (an adult Jonathan Lipnicki) has grown up, and uses Yahoo! A.I. (Yes even YAHOO! has A.I. that’s the point of the whole ad) to help sorta “Weekend at Bernie’s” Jerry’s lucrative career.
Yahoo! A.I. is the sports agent now, and Ray has fed its LLM all of Jerry’s catch phrases. Jerry fights the tech, still wanting to do a job he no longer can. It’s only when he’s confronted by an aging, low-earning Olympic shot putter he once ghosted (played, amazingly, by George Dzundza) who implores him to “give A.I. the chance you never gave me” that Jerry embraces it and squeezes out a few more years of his gig.
#6
More Budweiser. This time it’s the return of the Clydesdales. An equine marketing phenomenon that potentially confuses everyone in America under age 45, but which has been successful in getting the breed rated both the “most traditional” and the “most patriotic” among draught horses in one public opinion poll after another.
This time there’s no earnest, aproned, wizened old brewmaster. No Golden Retriever trying to steal a smooch from a horse. It’s just the Clydesdales trotting, proudly bringing wagon loads of bright-eyed immigrants across — no, no, no, no, no. Scratch that. The Clydesdales were given sativa edibles instead of indica. No.
Okay, the Clydesales are pulled over and inexplicably arrested, thanks to information they submitted to an Ancestry app in 2009. Actually they’re, okay, now the Clydesdales are at a political protest, it’s not clear what about, and one Clydesdale shares a meaningful moment of eye contact with a police horse while Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” plays. Or wait, they’re on a 42-city tour to help pay for a stable boy’s hernia because there’s no health insurance. Not sure.
#7
Recently, Jim Nantz commented on the crowd size: 70,000 in Buffalo for their playoff game against the Chiefs. Tony Romo remarked playfully that that’s the same number who watch him throw the ball around at home. Then he said he was just pretending and that the number is actually zero. This was confusing, although Romo defused the moment by laughing suddenly, and very loudly.
But he was lying about that, too. The actual number is five, and they’re not people. And they’re not watching him throw a ball around. They’re the Charmin Bear family, watching (along with an incredibly uncomfortable Jim Nantz, clad in a Masters’ blazer, wondering aloud if Mr. Kraft would be upset) as Tony takes a “bio break,” and ensuring that he makes good use of their preferred brand of toilet paper—as bears they are incapable of seeing it as a brand, or understanding what a brand is, and instead regard it as something like a god—and that toilet paper’s industry-leading softness.
“How’s it going in there?” the father bear calls out hopefully. On the other side of the door, Romo starts hooting in exactly the same way he did when Lamar Jackson caught his own deflected pass in the AFC Championship Game. The family of bears first high-five, and then, unconscionably, bump their butts together.
#8
We see a couple in bed. Looks cozy. Aspirational. Somewhere we’d want to be. Camera pulls back to reveal they’re actually in a van that’s parked in a big box parking lot. The cathode glow of a street lamp above them quietly expires. We see a montage. Cars. A patchy berm near a buzzing highway. An old Ford Taurus. A camper. A worn wooden bench in a neoclassical train station. A series of parking lots. People sleeping. Resting. Eating instant oatmeal cold (out of a Stanley thermos maybe). The light of their phones reflecting off of their faces. These “boondocking” spaces, once free, are now a premium Airbnb experience. Enjoy!
#9
Speaking of Jordan Peterson, Bud Light is not his only Super Bowl ad this year. He also appears in a spot for Sharpie markers with the Muppets.
We open on an old desk. One Benjamin Franklin might have used. We see a hand holding a Sharpie, writing on old parchment paper. It’s a dowry. The camera pulls back to reveal Peterson silently scribbling, while we hear his voiceover.
In the old days there was at the very least a dowry. An exchange. I don’t care if they’re made of felt. Or have the blessing of “public broadcasting.” It’s goddamn criminal is what it is.
Confused? You shouldn’t be. “Write the Truth” is the name of the campaign. Jordan Peterson is pleading with Miss Piggy not to “give her porcine parts to a frog for something as fleeting as fame” and “for a relationship as fake as your hair.”
Now I’m no expert, and I don’t know what this frog sticks where. But pig or not, you shouldn’t subject yourself to amphibian thrusting without even the promise of marriage. Nearly a half century of co-habitation and Kermit never put a ring on it. And that is sad.
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