Super Bowl LX offered a fascinating window into where AI stands in the broader advertising landscape, as both a subject of ads and as a tool for making them.
The AI ad invasion: 23% and counting
According to iSpot, 15 out of 66 Super Bowl ads featured AI in some capacity. AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Genspark, and several startups (Base44, Ramp, Rippling, Wix) all ran spots. The scale of the AI presence was remarkable, but the quality of the messaging was uneven at best.
As Adweek’s Trishla Ostwal noted, “Four years into the AI hype cycle and it’s never been more clear that AI is in a messaging crisis.”
The ads largely leaned on familiar narratives of helpfulness and accessibility without clearly articulating what sets one AI offering apart from another. Sonata Insights’ Debra Aho Williamson echoed this: “The commercials are similar to how AI was portrayed last year — practical use cases for AI or humanising AI in people’s daily lives.”
The challenge for AI companies is real. Only 7% of consumers report using Claude, versus 73% for ChatGPT and 41% for Gemini, according to S&P Global. As Emarketer’s Jeremy Goldman put it: AI companies’ “only chance is brand differentiation,” and they are under immense pressure to show investors returns that depend on exponential growth.
The notable AI ads and what worked (and didn’t)
OpenAI (Codex ad ): OpenAI’s second Super Bowl appearance focused on its Codex coding agent with the tagline “You can just build things,” featuring people building with circuit boards and robots. A second spot showed a farmer using ChatGPT to track crops. OpenAI reported over 500,000 Codex downloads since its February 2 launch. Ranked No. 45 on USA Today’s Ad Meter.
Anthropic/Claude (Can I Get a Six-Pack Quickly ): Anthropic’s anti-ads-in-chatbots campaign was the most talked-about AI ad of the night. It won the Super Clio and was ranked the best ad by Ad Age’s Tim Nudd. But it ranked No. 46 on Ad Meter and tested in the bottom 3% for likeability with general audiences. A fascinating case study in an ad that was brilliant for the industry conversation but may have confused the mass audience.
Amazon/Alexa+ (Alexaaaa+ ): Chris Hemsworth imagines all the ways Alexa+ AI could kill him — from decapitation via a jammed garage door to being trapped under a pool cover. Funny, celebrity-driven, and true to Amazon’s self-deprecating playbook. The spot served to introduce Alexa+ (Amazon’s generative AI voice assistant) to a broad audience. As New York Magazine’s John Herrman noted, the “Don’t worry, you dumb idiot” routine was amusing but also highlighted lingering consumer anxiety about AI in the home.
Meta/Oakley (AI glasses ): Meta showcased AI-enabled smart glasses designed to enhance athletic performance, branding it “Athletic Intelligence.” DEPT’s Ben Williams called it “a strong example of AI translated into tangible value” but said it lacked the memorability to become iconic.
Google (Gemini ): Highlighted Gemini and its Nano Banana image-generation model, continuing to position AI as deeply integrated into its ecosystem.
Salesforce/Slack (Slackbot ): Featured MrBeast promoting Slackbot’s AI chatbot features — a “curious choice,” as Herrman observed, for a target audience of CTOs and procurement professionals.
eta and Oakley showed off their AI glasses, calling them “Athletic Intelligence."
eta and Oakley showed off their AI glasses, calling them “Athletic Intelligence."
AI as a creative tool: Less than expected?
Here’s where I think the Super Bowl offered a genuinely surprising takeaway: Despite all the predictions that AI would transform Super Bowl ad production, the evidence was more cautionary than revolutionary.
Svedka’s AI-generated ad was a cautionary tale. The vodka brand ran what it called the first primarily AI-generated Super Bowl ad, reviving its robotic mascot with AI-trained dance moves. Viewers responded with words like “weird,” “surreal,” and “WTF.” Its brand match registered at just 7% — compared to a 63% norm for alcoholic beverage ads. It ranked No. 53 on Ad Meter. As DEPT’s Williams said, “Using AI to make the ad is not the idea. Here, AI as the tool to make the ad became the headline, resulting in a message that feels hollow.”
Artlist’s regional spot was self-aware but proved a point. AI design platform Artlist ran a regional Super Bowl ad that was entirely AI-generated and bragged about being made in five days for a few thousand dollars. The narration acknowledged the absurdity: “Heck, we bought this ad spot a week ago and made it in five days.” It was clever for what it was — a meta-commentary on the democratisation of ad production — but also demonstrated that AI-generated creative achieves “almost perfect levels of aesthetic anonymity,” as one reviewer put it.
Meanwhile, the top ads were entirely human-made. The top five ads on USA Today’s Ad Meter were all traditional, emotionally driven spots with no AI involvement in their creation: Budweiser’s American Icons (a Clydesdale helping a baby eagle learn to fly, set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird), Lay’s Last Harvest (a woman taking over her father’s potato farm), Pepsi’s The Choice (featuring polar bears), Dunkin’s Good Will Dunkin’ (’90s-era sitcom reunion), and Michelob Ultra’s The Ultra Instructor. All the AI-centric ads ranked in the bottom third.
And in what may be the sharpest counter-programming of the night, Chipotle ran an ad that explicitly poked fun at AI Super Bowl ads to spotlight its commitment to real ingredients — a reminder that “authentic” and “human” remain powerful brand positions in an era of AI saturation.
The takeaway: AI was predicted to be a much bigger force in ad creation this year than it turned out to be. The technology is advancing rapidly, but when it comes to Super Bowl-calibre storytelling, human creativity won out … this year. That said, AI-assisted production (which is harder to detect and less likely to be disclosed) may be more pervasive than the credits reveal. The real disruption in ad production may be happening quietly, behind the scenes, rather than as the headline.
Viewers didn’t love AI ads
Perhaps the most important data point for anyone in the advertising business: Despite what we’ve seen from previous AI creative testing, viewers generally reacted badly to AI-themed ads.
As one analysis noted, AI ads scored “very low for attention, likeability and watchability.” The “WTF” reaction was common across the AI category, signalling general audiences still find AI messaging confusing and off-putting. For AI companies spending millions to establish consumer brands, this is a sobering result.
It also underscores an opportunity for the brands and publishers that aren’t AI companies: In a world where AI messaging creates confusion, the trust, clarity, and human connection that news media brands offer becomes a more powerful differentiator, not a weaker one.
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Banner photo: Adobe Stock By ImageFlow.