Super Bowl Ads Are All Just Celebs Selling Out And It Sucks

Super Bowl 60 is over. The Seahawks won it all. Bad Bunny’s performance was amazing and just what was needed at this time. And as usual, there were many, many expensive commercials in-between all of the action. As has been the case for the last few years, basically every ad featured celebs and big-name actors selling out to help promote AI, donuts, crackers, and more. And almost all of it fucking sucked shit. It’s depressing to watch talented actors sell out. So many of the ads were for awful products. Nothing about them was even fun or memorable.

This year, for the first time in a bit, I decided to skip the Super Bowl. So instead, I only saw people’s reactions to the ads via social media, and it sounded bad. But when I woke up this morning and mainlined all of the ads, I was shocked to discover it was worse than I expected and even worse than the previous star-studded sell-out showcase that was Super Bowl 59. American culture’s marketing machine has hit a new low.

Many of the ads featured random assortments of celebs that seemed picked by rolling the dice. Worse, some of these ads used CG to de-age the celebs, compounding the horror. Many of the ads were too long and felt like nearly every marketing agency around the country has forgotten how to actually sell people stuff. The worst part of the night was Dunkin’ Donuts attempt at making a joke about ’90s sitcoms that seemingly started and ended with the same juice-less punchline: “Noted Dunkin’ lover Ben Affleck was in a movie that sort of rhymes with our company’s name.” A few million dollars later, the end result was this CG-face-filled cameo-packed nightmare.

Xfinity also got in on the de-aging celebs action with an ad that, on paper at least, sounds like a winner. What if Jurassic Park actually worked because our company’s internet powered it? Could be funny, but it’s hard to laugh when faced with CGI smooth-skinned versions of the film’s stars inhumanely moving around like haunted wax figures.

Here’s a great way to sell AI-assistants: Spend a minute showing all the ways it could murder you.

MrBeast was here too and wanted to sell you AI. He also demonstrated that despite making videos for years online, he seems to have zero charisma on camera. How was this the best take?

Then we have the case of Sofía Vergara, who wins the award for biggest sellout of the night for appearing in three different Super Bowl 2026 commercials. Look, $26 million mansions don’t pay for themselves, okay?

Meanwhile, Uber Eats continues to run with this marketing campaign built around some made-up conspiracy about food and the NFL, and… look, I have no idea why this is supposed to be funny or entertaining.

Don’t worry, Matthew Broderick was here to sell AI that will do your job for you in an ad that feels like Genspark had to pick its star after all the other companies already had theirs and got stuck with Ferris Bueller showing people how to AI-maxx at their lifeless office jobs.

Remember that thing from the 80s that was popular? I hope so, or otherwise this commercial won’t make any sense.

Medicine maker Novo Nordisk’s Super Bowl ad wins the award for “Most Random Celeb Appearances” by shoving anyone who was available in LA on a Tuesday a few weeks ago into it.

This is like one of those SNL fake ads featuring a real product, but somehow even less funny.

I’m so tired.

There are so many of these.

Please, I can’t keep watching all of these bad, boring, unfunny ads starring sellouts.

I’m tapping out here. This isn’t even all of them, but it’s enough to see that marketing agencies are cooked, AI companies are desperate, and actors no longer feel shame for selling out to sell crackers. Bad timeline. We need to shut it all down and start over.

As I said last year, stars and actors have been popping up in commercials for a long time. But around the time we entered the 2000s, something changed. To quote Zack from 2025:

Sure, if you dig through history you can find numerous examples of famous actors and artists appearing in ads, even during the height of their career. It definitely happened. However, it was still a fairly rare occurrence and most big-name actors were careful about appearing in too many. For example, Tommy Lee Jones and other Hollywood stars would fly over to Japan and other countries to do commercials so nobody over here in the States would see them. There was still a fear that if you sold out too much and too often you’d look desperate and signal that your career was ending. And this was the case for decades.

Then Super Bowl commercials became bigger and bigger in the 2000s and companies spent more and more to create a viral, popular ad. And as this was happening, the lines between TV, movies, and internet content started to blur, while streaming services and YouTube grew in popularity. Hustle culture—the belief that as long as you were getting paid it was worth it—also grew during this time.I remember people in 2015 cheering Kim Kardashian for appearing in a big Super Bowl ad and celebrating that she “got paid!” That has led us to nearly every damn Super Bowl ad including big name actos to help sell soda or crackers. And it’s all so sad.

See you next year when a de-aged Mark Hamill uses AI to help him blow up the Death Star alongside Snoop Dogg and some ’90s actor who needs to buy a new car.