10 Super Bowl ads you should watch again
If you watched the Super Bowl at a party or a bar, you likely missed out on actually being able to hear the commercials, which were underwhelming when compared to the actual barnburner of a game.
There were some funny ones though with Workday knocking it out of the park by lampooning a catchphrase people are saying way too often in the workplace these days. If you’re a dog lover, then you’ve got to see how The Farmer’s Dog tried to make you cry.
To make sure you didn’t miss anything good, here are the top 10 commercials you might have missed during Sunday’s Chiefs-Eagles Super Bowl ...
1. Workday: “Rock Star” Super Bowl commercials are at their best when they involve some level of celebrity, mixed with nostalgia and hammered home with actual humor. Workday nailed all three by getting Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Idol, Joan Jett and Gary Clark Jr., to team up and mock the most overused clichê in office life today: “You’re a rock star!” As Clark says while playing his guitar like no one else can, “Hey, Liz in HR. Can you do this?”
2. The Farmer’s Dog: “Forever”
Trying to pull on people’s heartstrings during the Super Bowl can be risky, because it often falls flat, but The Farmer’s Dog nailed it here. With Lee Fields’ song “Forever” playing, including the lyrics, “I’m gonna love you forever,” this spot starts with a puppy and a little girl telling her new companion, “I’ll always take care of you.” The commercial traces the dog and little girl’s life as she grows up, goes to college and eventually has a baby all while the dog, who is graying by the end, sticks by her side.
3. Dunkin’ Donuts: “Drive-Thru”
Your mileage may vary on this one depending on if you’re tired of seeing Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Personally, seeing Affleck doing Boston things — and what’s more Boston than that accent while working a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru line? — is usually funny. “You’re embarrassing me in front of my friends,” is a good line from Affleck, hammered home by Lopez’s “Is this what you do when you say you’re going to work all day?”
4. Tubi
This might be the most talked about Super Bowl commercial, just because of how effectively they punked so many people. Enlisting the game’s announcers Greg Olsen and Kevin Burkhardt to deliver an intro, then having the screen flip to the Tubi app was perfection. As someone with a toddler at home, we thought for sure our little one had surreptitiously grabbed the remote and changed the channel.
5. PopCorners: “Breaking Good”
At some point, we may get tired of seeing our favorites from “Breaking Bad” but this is is not that time. It’s always good to see Walter White and Jesse Pinkman on our screen again, and then when the legendary Tuco Salamanca shows up at the end? Chef’s kiss. (If you haven’t seen “Breaking Bad”, then none of those names mean anything to you and you should correct that expeditiously.)
6. NFL: “Run With It”
The NFL introduced us to flag football star Diana Flores by making her the star of an ad with some of the league’s best defensive players, including Jalen Ramsey, Sauce Gardner, Aidan Hutchinson and Cam Heyward. Plus, check out those moves by Flores. Impressive.
7. Bud Light: “Hold”
Although that annoying and familiar hold music may be triggering, Miles Teller and his wife Keleigh are just charming in this spot as they kill time waiting on hold by dancing in the living room.
8. T-Mobile: “Neighborly”
This one hit a couple different generations right in the nostalgia feels by having John Travolta recreating “Summer Nights” from Grease while Zach Braff and Donald Faison from “Scrubs”, which debuted on NBC 23 years after Grease hit theaters, join in on the act.
9. Michelob Ultra: New Members Day
Perhaps we’re showing our age here by giving a nod to commercials that reference Grease and now Caddyshack, both more than 40-year-old references. But Serena Williams filling the Ty Webb role is fun, as is Succession’s Brian Cox doing his best Judge Smalls. Plus, we get plenty of star-power including Tomball’s Jimmy Butler and Houston’s Nneka Ogwumike, as well as Canelo Alvarez, Tony Romo and Alex Morgan. We even got original actor Michael O’Keefe in the spot. Hey, we still like Caddyshack, what can we say?
10. He Gets Us: “Be Childlike” and “Love Your Enemies”
These are controversial, but they’re trending on social media and you’ll probably need to see them just to know what everyone’s talking about. He Gets Us is a campaign promoting Christianity and there’s no doubting the powerful visual imagery used in the spots. However, some of the campaign’s major donors have ties to farright ideologies that could be seen as contradictory to the ads’ messaging of inclusivity.