What the ad peddlers know

What this year's Super Bowl tells us about what we truly crave (and who can and can't deliver it)

There are plenty of good reasons to avoid football in general and the NFL in particular. We deserve a national pastime, but perhaps one less awash with money and CTEs and fighter jets and superficial anti-racist statements appearing and then disappearing depending on who is President.

All this is true, and also there will always be a part of me that loves the Super Bowl because there will always be a part of me that loves things that we all do together. The football game itself is usually fine. This year’s was better than usual for me specifically, both because I resent Kansas City’s team for a very obvious reason and because my nieces in Philly made a bunch of pro-Eagles signs and went down to Baltimore Avenue after the game to cheer on all the cars streaming into Center City. Also, Dallas Goedert is from a small town north of Aberdeen and went to South Dakota State. That’s more than enough to gain me as a bandwagon fan. Go Birds. Go Jackrabbits.

My favorite part of the Super Bowl is the morning after. I love listening to the drive time radio jockeys, even though I no longer have a car-based commute. I like knowing that their jobs were easier this morning because they didn’t have to put any thought into their discussion topics. For one Monday a year they could do it in their sleep, the DJs. They could run through it all without pausing to take a breath.

Didyouseethatonecommersialwiththecelebrities/

andwhatabouthehalftimeshow/

OMGDrakemustbehidingbehindarocknow/

andmaybeTrumptoo/

PrincewillalwaysbetheGOATinthatdepartment/

thegamewasprettyboring/

wellofcourseitwasitisneveraboutthegameitisaboutthebuffalodip/

ohmygodbuffalodip/

didyoumakeanybets/

ItooktheoveronhowmanytimesthecameraswouldcuttoTaylorSwift/

willthosetwojustgetmarriedalready/

staytunedfortrafficandweatheronthefifteens/

butfirstheresIrisbytheGooGooDolls.

Like the DJs, I too love buffalo chicken dip, even though I don’t think I’ve ever actually had it at a Super Bowl party. I love knowing that somebody else had it at their party, that they ate from a Crockpot and downed a few beers and sometimes talked but sometimes didn’t because there was something on the screen. I love knowing that some people only paid attention to the halftime show and other people enjoyed the game and still others got to feel some low stakes self-righteousness about how they ignored it all and instead went grocery shopping in an empty store. I love the Super Bowl in spite of many misgivings, because I still want so deeply to love us.

This year, I watched the game as God intended it (distracted by children). We decamped with some friends to a brewery that we knew would be fairly empty. We ordered Dominos and shawarma and took over a bunch of tables. I played Connect 4 against my daughter, answered Trivial Pursuit questions read by somebody else’s nine year old (“What was the first landlocked country to win the America’s Cup?” Switzerland, apparently) and fielded my eleven-year-old’s inquiries about Kendrick Lamar’s discography in between alternating bites of pita and Stuffed Cheesy Bread.

An aside on the halftime show. It was good, I thought. I am mildly interested in the debate about whether it was political enough or subversive enough, but have no desire to issue a Great White Take on the matter. My gut is that it was a fairly nuanced exploration of Blackness and the lanes that Black artists must slot themselves into in America and also how much Kendrick still loves hating Drake. Is it true that my version of a political statement leans a little closer to that one backup dancer with the Gaza/Sudan flags than Kendrick’s slightly more subtextual approach? Sure, but that’s probably why he has more Pulitzer Prizes than me, but I have more action alerts from the American Friends Service Committee in my inbox. Let’s call it a draw, K-Dot.

What I do want to discuss is the ads. I always want to discuss the ads. The ads frequently caught our group’s attention, making adults and children alike point at the screen and yell “yuck!” and “huh?” All of this is by design, of course. What a sweaty display— millions of dollars worth of celebrity cameos and high concept pitches all with the aim of being the ad that the drive time talkers and the water cooler gossipers and the otherwise Trivial Pursuit-focused nine-year-olds will be discussing the next day. Just think of all the collections of prestigious degrees and 80-hour-work-weeks that go into these annual swings for virality. I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness/pitching the idea of a Mountain Dew spot where a seal who is also the musical artist Seal looks like an absolute monster.

I try, as much as is possible, to ignore the products that the ads are pitching. I mean, it’s the usual suspects mostly: Snacks, beer, pharmaceuticals, AI and, um, Jesus (they were back! The Jesus guys! And what a gift, to be whisked back to a simpler time when one of the primary things to be upset about was the Jesus guys). It was nice that the crypto peddlers didn’t return this year (or maybe I just missed them?). But again, the what was being sold of it all isn’t the point. Advertising is a two part proposition: Appeal to a deep human desire and then propose the product in question as a salve. It’s the first part that fascinates me. Not how Cool Ranch Doritos will be deployed as the thing that I need, but what the greatest minds in advertising and consumer analytics have hypothesized this year as to the nature of my deepest longings.

In some ways, the answer to that question is always the same, regardless of the broader political moment. Every year there will be self-consciously ironic commercials where celebrities debase themselves because we like to be in on the joke. But there are year-over-year trends. Back when those crypto ads reined supreme, the subtext was all about not being left behind. When Apple pitched its iconic 1984 ads to middle-aged boomers, the implicit message was you still want to be an individualist rebel, don’t you? Some years we want to buy the world a Coke and other years it’s the end of history and the only thing left to do is buy ourselves a Crystal Pepsi right now.

I hated this year’s crop of ads, for the record. That’s a half lie, actually. Because I am a simple-minded sucker who loves ice cream and friendship and a very specific movie franchise, I clapped out loud for the one where Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez drive slowly and placidly thanks to the pacifying energy of a single Häägen-Dazs vanilla milk chocolate almond bar. I mean, look how slow they are! So slow that it upsets their good friend Christopher “Ludacris” Bridges!

Good ad, that one.

But back to me hating this year’s ads. I mean, of course I did. I always do, largely out of shame. Like all of us, I don’t like being sold things, which is why I get so frustrated when I take the bait. You should not trust me as a marketing critic, and not just because I am literally thinking about ice cream bars right now. Do you know that in spite of writing multiple essays unpacking narratives of masculinity, I currently have a bottle of moisturizing soap in my shower with a big bold FOR MEN label on it? You all, I did not buy the moisturizing soap in the pretty pastel bottle. I bought the one in the abrasive grey bottle. I am such a mark.

Speaking of men, thank God we were marketed to this Super Bowl. You were worried we would not be, what with how little attention we typically receive in this country. But yes, two of the most-discussed ads were about reassuring the fellas.

Here is the pair of ads in question.

In case you are wondering if the state of American masculinity is triumphant and assured after a manosphere-aided Trump victory, the counterpoint lies in how much us guys still apparently need ads that whisper at us, don’t worry, you’re still a man. You’re still a man even if you’re an aging suburban dad, shout chill bros Post Malone and Shane Gillis! You can still throw ragers and shoot beers out of phalluses leaf blowers even if you’re a member of a Homeowners Association and a receiver of colonoscopies. The subtext is text, but also (because I too love having a good, silly time with my neighbors): I laughed.

As for the Google ad, oh buddy. The plot follows a stay-at-home dad who is about to re-enter the workforce. He’s nervous about his job interview. He needs a pal to reassure him that the skills that he’s gained in a private care-space will be valued in a hard-charging private workplace. He needs to be told that he wasn’t just a good dad, but that he can be a productive, successful employee. There’s already a lot going on there. But because this is 2025 and all the money in the world is being spent convincing us that we need the machines, the kicker is that he does not receive this reassurance from another human, but from his phone’s AI. It’s all extremely dystopian and unnerving but also (because there are a bunch of scenes of the guy’s daughter getting older and I watched it with my literal daughter on my lap): I cried.

And that’s the thing. Setting aside the specific dude whispering offerings, as I took in the total slate of ads, I realized how often I found myself sympathetic— again, not at all to the products and solutions being pitched— but to the longing that they were attempting to evoke.

I would have expected, in the year of Trump triumphant, to have this year’s ads all be about toughness and torque, about dominance and winning so much we get tired of it. But whether they were selling mortgages or mayonnaise, this year the ad peddlers deployed a decidedly gentler set of emotional lures.

Again and again, Super Bowl viewers were reminded that we crave friendship, community and care. Many of the ads were nostalgic, but less for a time when the world was perfect than when at the very least we could navigate it together. More than once, our better angels were appealed to. There were a few feminist-adjacent ads for women’s sports and a couple about how we shouldn’t hate each other. Multiple ads implored us to reunite with long lost family or have a good time with our neighbors, and there was a notable quantity of alien content wherein the extraterrestrials in question just wanted to be our friends. Even Chat GPT, in a desperate attempt to make us trust it, threw up its hands and said, essentially, you all liked a lot of other old technologies that brought the world together, so maybe you’ll enjoy our environment destroying death machines too?

At the risk of being overly didactic (Kendrick Lamar, I am not), let me reiterate gain. None of this is an argument for how the ads were good, actually. I absolutely despise the cynical exercise at the heart of all this, the debauched alchemy of spinning beautiful emotions into profit. The problem with these commercials, of course, is that they are lying to us. “Country Roads” or not, Rocket.com can not bring us home, nor will Nike bring us gender equity or Chat GPT better human-to-human connection. We all know this.

The reason why I’m pointing out the surprisingly gentle subtext of these ads, each of them developed by firms that have spent millions of dollars attempting to discern the national mood, is that they point to a crack in the narrative we’ve been sold about this political moment. We continue to be told that everything that the current administration is doing is popular, actually: the deportations, the defunding health care across the world, the elimination of entire Federal departments full of helpers. We are told that all of our neighbors wake up every morning with a deep desire to stick it to trans people and disappear Salvadorean families to Guantanamo.

We are assured that in 2025, Americans truly wish the worst on each other and the world, but that narrative ignores the fact that everything the current administration is doing relies on the same bait-and-switch as the ads. Our neighbors are being told “if you support women’s sports, than it’ll come at the cost of transphobia” or “there’s not enough to go around, so if you want the government to care for you, we have to kick somebody else out.” We are assured, pointedly, that this does not make us uncaring, but are instead offered the deeply pernicious “hard truth” that some of us must suffer for others of us to be OK.

The ad peddlers know, however cynically, that, despite appearance to the contrary, many of our neighbors are actually craving community, connection and love. And that doesn’t mean that we haven’t all internalized the logic of broken systems that lie to us about hierarchies and scarcity. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t, at the core of all of our psyches, a deep wellspring of racism, sexism, transphobia, heterosexism and nativism. But it does mean that many of us are searching for something beautiful but elusive— the opportunity to care and be cared for. And of course it is phenomenally tragic that everything we’re being offered right now— both by our leaders and our corporations— won’t scratch that itch.

But for those of us who currently feel alone in the work of care and connection— who fear that nobody will come to our meetings and that our protests will remain tiny and ignored—their hollowness is our opportunity. Our neighbors, regardless of their politics, won’t find what they’re seeking from Donald Trump or Elon Musk. Google AI won’t make them more loving dads. Bud Light won’t make them better friends. The NFL won’t bring about the end of patriarchy. We are the only ones who can do that for each other.

Damnit that work feels lonely now. I feel that loneliness in my bones. But what millions upon millions of ad dollars this year presupposes is that even when it looks like our country merely has an appetite for cruelty and isolation, us lonesome dreamers aren’t the only ones longing for something different. And if that’s where the national mood resides, I’d much rather be a lonely voice offering a true solution than a powerful voice offering a cruel lie.

End notes:

1. You want to know a time, quite recently, when I didn’t feel alone? This past Friday, because I got to be with a lovely crew of bleeding hearts in the first of our Barnraisers winter classes (about building the kind of communities that help us fight for a better world). The same class is being offered six more times, so come join us! It remains free and virtual and (I am assured) a very good time. More info here and registration here.

2. Every week, I put a reminder here that everything I do here— Barnraisers Project classes and coaching and this newsletter- is both my and one other (lovely) person’s day job. My colleague Carly and I offer everything we do for free, but can only do so thanks to donations and (in particular) paid subscriptions to this newsletter. And because of that, every week a few more folks raise their hands and say “I can help!" (which is important, because many weeks a few other folks need to let their subscriptions lapse, which is understandable). Could you be one of the hand raisers this week? And if not could you share this piece with pals? Thanks for considering.

3. As for this week’s Song of the Week, I still need to update the Apple Music and Spotify playlists, but in the meantime, in honor of the drive time DJs, let’s hear that plaintive ukulele.

Also, again, I really enjoyed Kendrick’s performance but Noname still has a point:

4. You’re getting a rare “Monday afternoon essay” this week. Will that mean that there will be room for a bonus public essay in addition to the subscribers’ discussion on Thursday? Maybe? Maybe not. Let’s watch the world together and see if if more words are useful or not. Regardless, I appreciate you all so much.