What do the 2026 Super Bowl ads tell us? That we obsess over our weight while guzzling beer and soda, downing potato chips and ordering food delivery from our couches? We already knew that.
What’s new this year is the onslaught of commercials trying to convince us that artificial intelligence is going to change our lives — there will be at least 10 ads for A.I. chatbots or other A.I.-based services. But, aware of the fear A.I. inspires in many people, the ads mostly offer to change our lives in small, unthreatening ways.
What follows is the pregame edition of my annual ranking of Super Bowl commercials; a complete list will be published following the game. Do not look for my picks to correlate with any of the various emotion-meter rankings. (Clydesdales do not make my heart beat faster.)
Only ads that will be broadcast nationally during the game are included. This means leaving out the William Shatner “Will Shat” Raisin Bran ad, which would have ranked very high. But you have to draw the line somewhere.
Emma Stone throws a hissy fit because the domain name she wants is unavailable. In her sixth collaboration with the director Yorgos Lanthimos (she’s an Oscar nominee for their fifth, “Bugonia”), they have finally found the proper running time. The 30-second art-house sendup to be shown during the game is a winner; the 90-second extended version, available online, is already bloated.
NO. 2
Dove
Smiling young athletes dance and compete to a heavy beat in the soap brand’s latest service spot about body image and girls’ sports. Good vibes in a colorful package.
Sabrina Carpenter builds her dream man — Pringleleo — out of potato chips, only to learn that celebrity worship can be all-consuming. She’s funny and the spot is clever, though are we all getting a little tired of people using Leonardo DiCaprio as the avatar of the ultimately unavailable man?
NO. 4
He Gets Us
The Christian ad campaign deserves credit for devoting most of its spot to a montage chastising the preoccupations — with money, material goods, physical appearance, online distraction, gambling — that most of the commercials around it are feeding.
NO. 5
Lay’s
Dad passes the potato farm down to his farmer daughter. Simple, and sappy in the best way, it perfects an approach the chip maker tried with less success last year.
NO. 6
Kinder Bueno
The no bueno/yes bueno premise is extremely dopey, but the ad built around it — a grab bag of sci-fi and space-travel allusions, with William Fichtner happily munching a candy bar in mission control — is kind of fun.
NO. 7
Pepsi
A polar bear — a longtime Coca-Cola mascot — loses his bearings after choosing Pepsi over Coke in a taste test. Taika Waititi directed the spot and does a cameo as the bear’s analyst; it loses steam after the very cute opening shot.
NO. 8
Instacart
Ben Stiller as a techno-disco singer (shades of Zoolander) who is dangerously jealous of his performing partner, played by Benson Boone; it all makes more sense in the long version, which reveals that they’re brothers. The spot, directed by Spike Jonze, is plugging the food-delivery company’s online banana-ripeness selector, which is pretty strange in its own right.
NO. 9
Ro
Serena Williams lends her considerable presence and credibility to a very straightforward plug for the company’s GLP-1 weight-loss meds. She’s hard to argue with.
NO. 10
Hellmann’s
Andy Samberg, as a low-level Neil Diamond impersonator (there are high-level ones), sells mayonnaise by leading diner customers in a singalong of “Sweet Sandwich Time” before hitting on Elle Fanning. Harmless fun, if you don’t count the 10 grams of fat per serving.
NO. 11
Rocket
There’s an awful lot going on in the mortgage company’s pitch-free ad: disgruntled young girls, a divorce, moves to new houses, a possibly racist cold shoulder, a storm, a missing dog. It may be hard to follow over nachos, but it’s heart is in the right place, and Lady Gaga’s cover of the Mister Rogers theme song is sweet.
NO. 12
T-Mobile
Just admit it: You love that darned song.
NO. 13
Manscaped
Emo hairballs sing a plaintive love ballad to the formerly hirsute men who have used the company’s products to break up with them. Amusing in a lowest-common-depilatory way.
NO. 14
TurboTax
Adrien Brody sends up his reputation for taking his work, and perhaps himself, a little too seriously. It has some charming moments, but it’s working awfully hard to sell us on an easier way to do our taxes.
NO. 15
Bud Light
The Bud Light players — Peyton Manning, Shane Gillis and Post Malone — take part in a stampede that turns a wedding into a sweaty free-for-all. Nearly three years after the conservative backlash against its hiring a transgender woman to promote the brand, Bud Light is still basically waving its arms and yelling: “Beer! Beer!”
Oakley’s snippets of athletes in action are nicely filmed and edited, but the use cases for smart glasses are not all that compelling. (It doesn’t help that the spot is split into two 30-second ads for the game.) The best moment comes when Spike Lee tells his glasses to film a playground dunk, but we’re not Spike Lee.
NO. 17
Blue Square Alliance Against Hate
The nonprofit founded by the Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft, follows up last year’s arresting spot — Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg yelling insults at each other — with a vignette in the style of an after-school special. Touching, but it feels like it was made in an earlier century.
NO. 18
Toyota
The carmaker goes the aww route in two ads. One offers a multigenerational ode to fastening your seatbelt; in the second, the NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, the Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Puka Nacua and the Paralympian Oksana Masters are urged on by younger versions of themselves.
NO. 19
Ring
The earnest plug for the security camera’s helpfulness in finding your lost dog is heartwarming. Not necessarily so heartwarming, for those with privacy concerns, is the image of all the security cameras in the neighborhood talking to one another in order to find your lost dog.
NO. 20
Boehringer Ingelheim
The German pharma heavyweight mimics a high-tech spy-movie trailer, complete with “In a world …,” to push urine tests for kidney damage. Meh, but Octavia Spencer and Sofia Vergara are fun to watch.
NO. 21
Michelob Ultra
Joseph Kosinski, director of the Oscar best picture nominees “Top Gun: Maverick” and “F1,” headed to the slopes for a just barely entertaining spot starring Kurt Russell as a guru of the manly arts, in this case skiing.
NO. 22
Novartis
Actual N.F.L. tight ends (Rob Gronkowski, George Kittle) in peaceful scenarios (hammocks, yoga) illustrate how taking a blood test for prostate cancer screening allows a man to relax his tight end. A long way to go for a crass play on words.
NO. 23
Budweiser
The Clydesdales, an American eagle, Lynyrd Skynyrd: The spot, titled “American Icons,” goes all out in its bid for nostalgic patriotic sentiment, and it will rank at the top of many Super Bowl-ad surveys. Bonus zeitgeist points for the image of a seemingly winged Clydesdale, like an avenging equine angel.
NO. 24
Grubhub
Yorgos Lanthimos’s second ad (see Squarespace, above) presents a crew of dinner guests depicted with his trademarked smug grotesquerie and then reassures us with the uber-normality of a turtlenecked George Clooney. Note how the announcer’s voice goes flat on the last two words of “No more fees on restaurant orders over 50” (dollars).
NO. 25
Amazon Alexa
Manly man Chris Hemsworth admits to Elsa Pataky (his wife in real life) that he’s terrified of A.I. and starts imagining how Alexa might try to kill him. Of the ads that play on people’s fears about artificial intelligence, it’s the least off-putting.
NO. 26
Ritz
The cracker dealer’s shtick is to have celebrities act “salty,” as in less friendly than they (supposedly) actually are. The unfortunate result is that they usually end up being less funny than they actually are. Jon Hamm overcomes that here; Bowen Yang does not.
NO. 27
Xfinity
Rebooting the Xfinity Wi-Fi turns Jurassic Park into a safe, family-friendly amusement park, and isn’t that exactly what you always wanted it to be? The presence of Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill and some peaceful dinosaurs does not make up for the sheer self-canceling dopiness of the pitch.
NO. 28
Base44
The company’s app-building tools are so exciting that they inspire everyone in the office to create their own software, which has to make you wonder: If everyone is busy building apps, is any actual work getting done? (There’s more to watch in this ad, however, than in the analogous spot by Base44’s parent company, Wix.)
NO. 29
Nerds
Andy Cohen takes a break from the reality-TV demimonde — to walk a gigantic candy-crusted gummy down a red carpet. You reap what you sow!
NO. 30
A mom uses Google’s Gemini to find and edit photos for her sentimental young son. Apparently the way to humanize A.I. is to show it doing things we already know how to do.
NO. 31
YouTube TV
The streaming TV service spends 60 seconds on an excruciating series of puns and plays on “meh,” leaving itself about as wide open to easy comebacks as it is possible to be.
NO. 32
Novo Nordisk
Why is the first Super Bowl ad for the Wegovy weight-loss pill a supersized 90 seconds? Well, there were a lot of celebrities to squeeze in, including Kenan Thompson, DJ Khaled, John C. Reilly, Danielle Brooks, Danny Trejo and Ana Gasteyer. But the real reason is probably those 35-plus seconds of warnings about side effects. Talk about killing the mood.
NO. 33
Wix
A soulful designer of soulful furniture uses Wix’s A.I.-assisted tool to build her web szzzzzzz schgggllrp what? I’m not sleeping, you are!
NO. 34
Fanatics Sportsbook
Two equally labored jokes — that the Kardashian curse is real, and that Kendall Jenner has made her money by betting against her cursed former boyfriends — in one talky commercial.
NO. 35
Anthropic
The A.I. company plays on our fears about A.I., having a human answer a question in a creepy singsong as a way of making the point, rather incongruously, that Anthropic’s Claude chatbot will not have ads. (No one says “never.”) The overall effect? Creepy.
NO. 36
Uber Eats
The food-delivery company sticks to its unwieldy conspiracy theme, with Matthew McConaughey once again arguing that football is just a big plot to sell food; this time he’s trying to convince Bradley Cooper, whose apparent lack of enthusiasm may be contagious.
NO. 37
Svedka
We have seen the future, and it is terrifyingly bland. The only interesting thing about this mostly A.I.-generated ad, which features Svedka’s robot mascots (who double as minibars) dancing and slinging vodka, is that actual humans entered a contest to design the dance moves that were then shoveled into an A.I.
NO. 38
Hims & Hers
The same formula as last year: a nightmare vision of the current American health-care system followed by a vague and unconvincing pitch for the company’s telehealth services. Up-close face lifts are not a feel-good image.
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