{"id":2273504,"date":"2026-02-09T04:34:27","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T04:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2273504"},"modified":"2026-02-09T04:34:27","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T04:34:27","slug":"the-super-bowl-ads-last-year-welcomed-donald-trumps-return-what-a-difference-a-year-makes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/the-super-bowl-ads-last-year-welcomed-donald-trumps-return-what-a-difference-a-year-makes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Super Bowl Ads Last Year Welcomed Donald Trump\u2019s Return. What a Difference a Year Makes."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Last year, the Super Bowl emanated from the eye of the vibe shift. Donald Trump had just scored his first popular-vote victory, remaking American consensus, and brands far and wide scrambled to meet the tastes of a newly MAGAfied polity. In practice, that mostly resulted in a revival of obnoxious early 2000s machismo\u2014girls in bikinis, Shane Gillis, dewy-eyed tributes to the heartland, and so on. It was a bleak enterprise. Generally speaking, when Harrison Ford is using a Jeep commercial<\/a> to forward the idea that Republicans and Democrats aren\u2019t so different after all, there\u2019s a good chance the national spirit is ebbing at an all-time low.<\/p>\n

Well, it turns out, the conservative cultural paramountcy was hilariously short-lived. Trump\u2019s approval rating bottomed out in the months after the inauguration, and currently it\u2019s hovering in the mid-30s<\/a>. Amid the rebuke, brands have recoiled back within the antiseptic neutrality where they\u2019re most comfortable: irrelevant celebrity cameos, cheap millennial nostalgia, unmoored wistfulness for simpler days. Given that it is 2026, those efforts were put forth in service of A.I. and bloodless tech platforms. Didn\u2019t we used to make things in this country?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get to this, the best and worst ads of the night:<\/p>\n

Squarespace <\/strong>is the venue for the latest collaboration between Emma Stone and auteur director Yorgos Lanthimos. I take that as proof that the web-hosting company\u2014which you usually hear about during podcast advertisement breaks\u2014has accrued more juice than I could ever have imagined. It turns out when you hand the car keys to a guy like Lanthimos, he is going to direct a commercial that assumes that a vast cross-section of Americans are familiar with the tropes of Bergman-tinged melodrama. With all that said, a bonfire composed of burning laptops is a good summation of 2026\u2019s current flavor of anxiety.<\/p>\n

Lanthimos actually has two commercials this Super Bowl cycle. This one is more cut-and-dry. A handsome George Clooney tells a table of malcontents that Grubhub <\/strong>delivery orders are no longer going to be encumbered with miscellaneous fees, which is huge news for the growing number of Americans who, seemingly, do not know how to cook. Seriously, what is Lanthimos up to? These ads better be bankrolling the most distressing movie ever made.<\/p>\n

Bowen Yang is in a huge number of commercials these days, and every time I see him, I get a little more bummed out. Here he is for Ritz<\/strong>, alongside Jon Hamm and Scarlett Johansson, letting a couple dead-on-arrival punchlines fly. We need to save some of these SNL expats, man. Let Yang make a George Santos movie!<\/a><\/p>\n

The considerable talents of Shane Gillis are once again leveraged for a vacuous Bud Light<\/strong> commercial, which is very much in line with the company\u2019s ongoing flirtation with the MAGA-voting public. (Remember when conservatives were furious at Budweiser? That feels approximately 1,000 years ago.) Gillis is legitimately funny, and I wish he\u2019d play against type more often. On the other hand, I would be okay with never seeing Post Malone on my television ever again.<\/p>\n

Andy Cohen\u2019s Nerds <\/strong>ad is reminiscent of a more sensible time, where celebrities of a certain class\u2014read: people who are not movie stars\u2014popped up in Super Bowl commercials. I do not need George Clooney or Emma Stone to inform me that there is now a larger kind of Nerds Gummy Clusters on the market, but the guy who goes toe-to-toe with Dorinda Medley is a perfect fit.<\/p>\n

Xfinity <\/strong>saves Jurassic Park from destruction by simply turning a router back on, preventing a cataclysmic security breakdown. What follows is an alternate version of the film where nothing goes wrong, and nobody gets eaten by velociraptors. Those who grew up with the film will be struck by the distinct mid-\u201990s film grain dusted onto Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, both of whom have been uncannily de-aged. I like the ad, and I\u2019m chilled to the bone by the technology. I guess that\u2019s what it feels like to be alive these days?<\/p>\n

There is a strange, refractive moment at the end of this Fanatics <\/strong>commercial where Kendall Jenner bets on the New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl. But, apparently because Fanatics doesn\u2019t have the requisite licensing privileges, instead what appears on her phone are the words \u201cNEW ENGLAND\u201d inscribed under a generic helmet. It sums up the overall texture of the sports-betting boom. There is money everywhere, and yet everything still feels like a scam.<\/p>\n

Svedka <\/strong>has the dubious honor of producing the most evidently A.I.-generated commercial of the year. The vodka brand asked the machines to create some dancing robots for them, who move with all the grace of the Crazy Frog. It\u2019s the most egregious example of viral-baiting I\u2019ve seen tonight. A 30-second spot at the Super Bowl goes for $8 million these days. Can you guys please hire an actor?<\/p>\n

There is a scene in this Sabrina Carpenter Pringles <\/strong>ad where she constructs a man entirely out of potato chips, and canoodles with him between the sheets, ostensibly after some mind-blowing sex. It kinda gives new meaning to the phrase, \u201cOnce you pop you just can\u2019t stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our second potato-chip ad comes from Lay\u2019s<\/strong>, and it takes a much different approach. A father and daughter sit on a potato farm, reflecting on a generation\u2019s worth of successful harvests in service of the Lay\u2019s corporation, while a weepy cover of Keane\u2019s \u201cSomewhere Only We Know\u201d plays in the background. (The dad is about to retire. He\u2019s handing off the farm to his kid.) You know what gets me to the snack aisle? Good old-fashioned emotional terrorism.<\/p>\n

Here is the exact same fucking ad, this time by way of Toyota. <\/strong>Fathers and sons around this great nation are bonding over Rav 4s, a car most of us are familiar with when we try to save as much money as possible while standing at the Hertz rental desk.<\/p>\n

If you are moved by a Budweiser<\/strong> Clydesdale ad in 2026, you officially qualify for AARP.<\/p>\n

.https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=PGkhZ5fToOk&t=8s<\/p>\n

Kurt Russell has never drank a Michelob<\/strong> Ultra<\/strong>. I simply refuse to believe it.<\/p>\n

I found myself irrationally angry about the way T-Mobile <\/strong>convinced the Backstreet Boys to parody \u201cI Want It That Way\u201d with facile sloganeering. (One sample lyric: \u201cTell me why \/ It\u2019s America\u2019s best network.\u201d) I guess that means I harbor some improper feelings about the sanctity of the Backstreet Boys catalogue. The joke is on me!<\/p>\n

Similarly, when the Coinbase <\/strong>logo popped up at the end of this Backstreet Boys everyone at my party booed.<\/p>\n

I have the same issue with this State Farm <\/strong>ad, which does not feature Jon Bon Jovi, but does let Keegan-Michael Key play a hammy, Reddit-y cover of \u201cLiving On A Prayer\u201d\u2014a song near and dear to my heart. I guess I should never grow to value any popular music, because it will always become contaminated by the Super Bowl.<\/p>\n

As someone who enjoyed The Brutalist, and was subsequently horrified by Adrien Brody\u2019s Academy Awards acceptance speech\u2014perhaps the single greatest documentation of overwrought Actor Brain ever broadcasted live\u2014I do appreciate the way Turbo Tax <\/strong>takes the piss. Brody is materially correct that any honest commercial about a tax service ought to reflect the misery of an early-April weekend paging through illegible municipal directives, and it\u2019s legitimately funny that this is the first project he\u2019s taken on since the Oscar win. Maybe he does get it, after all.<\/p>\n

This Manscaped <\/strong>ad ends with a dude flushing his recently shaved chest hair down the toilet, immediately making the company a sworn enemy of plumbers and landlords nationwide.<\/p>\n

Ring <\/strong>is one of the most evil companies in the world. Here, it justifies the creation of a dystopian, paranoid police state because it will make it easier to find someone\u2019s lost dog. Sounds great. Put the entire neighborhood under constant surveillance so your stupid labrador can find its way home.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right, baby. We\u2019ve got GLP-1 commercials at the Super Bowl. The brand here is Wegovy, <\/strong>and the runtime drags longer than the other ads here. That\u2019s because after DJ Khaled and Kenan Thompson extol the virtues of this miracle drug, a voiceover recounts a litany of potential side effects\u2014vomiting, diarrhea, kidney problems, things of that nature. Here\u2019s to a lifetime of dopamine modulation, I guess. We are through the looking glass now.<\/p>\n

Wix<\/strong> is here to make the case that anyone can code now with the unlimited power of AI, so long as you\u2019re able to write a prompt. In the commercial a woman uses it to design a website for her furniture refurbishment company, which, given the advent of Grok, is the least nefarious possibility one could wield with such a capacity.<\/p>\n

Rob Gronkowski, George Kittle, and Greg Olsen are tight ends, a pass-catching position in football. The term \u201ctight end\u201d is also a wondrously pliable euphemism. Naturally, the pharmaceutical company Novartis <\/strong>is using these tight ends for a commercial about prostate cancer screenings. Do you get it? We\u2019re talking about butts.<\/p>\n

Levi\u2019s <\/strong>also has a butt-centric commercial, this one starring Megan Thee Stallion, which I will not be commenting on further because I do not want to get divorced.<\/p>\n

I said last year that I didn\u2019t really know what Instacart <\/strong>does. I still don\u2019t know, and I\u2019m less keen to find out now that the brand has tied its cart to the milquetoast Benson Boone\u2014who must be absolutely steaming about how quickly Alex Warren has stolen his thunder in the ongoing youth group-ification of the Billboard charts. The company gets good mileage out of Boone\u2019s trademark backflip here, but yeah\u2014goodbye forever, dude!<\/p>\n

I have enjoyed the caustic verve of this Claude.ai <\/strong>promotional campaign, which seems to be heading off the inevitable swoon of the A.I. revolution before it firmly takes hold. The basic principle is that, with time, ChatGPT is going to start handing out sponsored brand recommendations in its feedback\u2014while Claude will never do such a thing. It feels a little bit like Skynet giving us a heads up before incinerating the atmosphere, but I\u2019ll take it.<\/p>\n

He Gets Us <\/strong>has been running these strange, Jesus-themed commercials for multiple Super Bowls in a row now, and they\u2019re only getting more contrived. This time around, we follow a bunch of young people having a blast\u2014snapping selfies, gambling in Vegas, cutting together an awesome DJ mix\u2014only to be lectured that anhedonic stasis is the only way to Feel God. Hilariously, it makes this case by jump-cutting to a woman on a very expensive-looking hike through the Rocky Mountains or something. Leave me alone, man!<\/p>\n

The thesis of this Kinder Bueno <\/strong>ad seems to be that aliens have not yet destroyed Earth because chocolate and hazelnut go really well together. I\u2019m pretty sure this also happens in Arrival.<\/p>\n

A polar bear suffers through an existential crisis of faith after realizing that he prefers Pepsi Max <\/strong>to Coke Zero. This would, perhaps, be more effective if Pepsi made the bold case that Diet Pepsi is better than Diet Coke, but even in the hyperreality of the Super Bowl commercial slate, one can only bend the truth so far.<\/p>\n

Dunkin\u2019 Donuts <\/strong>comes through with a legitimately well-executed tandem of random mid-\u201990s sitcom references (Jennifer Aniston shows up with the Rachel haircut) and Boston superiority (Tom Brady is presented as a Chad). It\u2019s good!<\/p>\n

MrBeast is shilling for Salesforce<\/strong>, a collaboration that previously ran during the Winter Olympics. In the ad he seems to stand astride the world, a 2010s Michael Bay-style epic zoom-out to space revealing the global reach of both his vacant stare and the Salesforce CRM. I will spend 72 hours in a sensory deprivation tank eating nothing but Feastables if someone will just explain to me once and for all what Salesforce actually does.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Last year, the Super Bowl emanated from the eye of the vibe shift. Donald Trump had just scored his first popular-vote victory, remaking American consensus, and brands far and wide scrambled to meet the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2273505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[22389,310048,32720,353320,347085,440074,310131,368466,346955,434490,345734],"class_list":["post-2273504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-donald-trump","tag-emma-stone","tag-george-clooney","tag-george-kittle","tag-harrison-ford","tag-jeep-commercial","tag-new-england-patriots","tag-shane-gillis","tag-super-bowl","tag-super-bowl-commercials","tag-yorgos-lanthimos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/The-Super-Bowl-Ads-Last-Year-Welcomed-Donald-Trumps-Return.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2273504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2273506,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273504\/revisions\/2273506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2273505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2273504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2273504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2273504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}