Super Bowl 2026: Where AI Meets Nostalgia (And We’re Still Shaking Our Booties) BODIES & BOTS #5

I’ve been dissecting Super Bowl ads since 2013, back when actual advertising people gathered in actual rooms of humans to debate the merits of beer commercials.

Those days are gone, baby. But my addiction to critiquing how brands spend obscene amounts of money remains intact. And now, I’m looking at the world through the lens of a 70-year-old woman who began her marketing career in 1980 and has seen some things change radically while others are timeless.

For example, big brands and ad agencies are spending obscene amounts of money to show up in our living rooms. I mean a record-shattering $10 million for a 30-second spot. That’s more than most people will earn in a lifetime, spent to sell you mayo.

The smart brands leverage digital media and old-school retail marketing to integrate their campaigns. For example, Dunkin is giving away 1,995 cups of iced coffee today. And the QR code giveaway is apparently here to stay. And, of course, we watched ads before Sunday and can watch them again now, thanks to social media.

The New Super Bowl Playbook: What’s Trending

1. AI Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Cars? So 2015. This year, advertisers are selling us AI companions, tech services, and automated health screenings. Because nothing says “football Sunday” like contemplating your mortality and whether a robot can do your job better than you. But the tech brands seem to be aware of that and are reassuring us. Genspark‘s spot included a fun wink to Ferris Bueller, Ring showed their tech helping a family find a lost dog, and Codex/OpenAI did a brilliant job of illustrating the evolution of technology and positioning AI as the natural next step. Svedka ran its first vodka ad in 30+ years with AI-generated robots. Talk about combining old and new! See #3.
2. We Aspire to Healthily Live to 100 (Hooray!) GLP-1 drugs, prostate cancer screenings, and kidney disease testing turned the Big Game became a wellness expo. The message? We’re obsessed with living healthier, longer lives, even as the movie previews reminded us the world might be ending. The healthcare wealth gap was on full display, but hey, at least we’re all planning for our centennial birthdays during the apocalypse.
3. Nostalgia Has a New Birth Year The ’80s and ’90s are officially retro, folks. If you remember watching Friends in real time or owning a Discman, congratulations! You’re now a cultural artifact that brands want to mine for emotional resonance and cash. Levi’s received its first patent for jeans in 1873. Just goes to show that even an “old” brand can have new life breathed into it!
4. The Classics Go Supersized. Mayo. Coffee. Budweiser. Chips. Soft drinks. They’re still here, still selling, just LOUDER and BIGGER, featuring more celebrity cameos than your average awards show.
5. We Are Becoming Products Too, Along With Our Personal Life Experiences. Wix, AI.com, and Squarespace all encouraged us to secure our URLs and build our online brands.
6. Peace & Love Ads Became a Genre Millions of dollars were spent on PSAs essentially begging us to be nice to each other, regardless of race or ethnicity. Even Jesus got his own spot. When the Prince of Peace needs a Super Bowl ad, you know we’re in strange times.
7. Women: Still Mostly Decorative. Sure, the winning team’s owner is a badass 67-year-old philanthropist, and yes, I spotted more women correspondents on the field. Mom saves the day for WeatherTech, schooling her husband on car accessories. Progress! And I love, love, love Dove for focusing on women’s body image issues. But let’s be real: most female screen time still involves booty-shaking. Because even in 2026, apparently, that’s what sells alongside your AI-powered health screening. I do, however, appreciate that a woman farmer is inheriting the Lay’s potato farm and that women are sprinkled throughout the AI ads, solving problems.

The Expensive Elephant in the Room

Here’s what gets me: We’re spending the GDP of a small nation on 30-second spots telling people to love their neighbors while simultaneously selling them technology that will replace human connection. We’re drowning in nostalgia for decades, and we’re simultaneously trying to tech-optimize out of existence.

The irony is thicker than the guacamole at your Super Bowl party. But many marketers are zooming in on the human benefits of their AI and technology.

I love the craft of a good commercial. The storytelling, the strategy, the sheer audacity of spending $10 million to make you feel something about potato chips. But this year felt like watching America have an identity crisis in 30-second increments.

Are we innovating or retreating? Connecting or isolating? Empowering women or still just filming their butts?

Yes.

The Verdict

Super Bowl 2026 was a beautiful, expensive, contradictory mess—much like America itself. We want AI to solve everything, but we also want to remember when life was simpler (even though it wasn’t). We want unity (in paid programming), but we’re still selling products using the same tired playbook for gender representation.

And yet, I can’t look away. Because beneath all the excess and contradiction, there are still moments of genuine creativity, storytelling that moves you, and campaigns that actually work. Because ads are simply little (expensive) stories about products and services, designed to move you to buy stuff.

And who doesn’t tear up at least a little watching a baby bird grow into a bald eagle and head off into the sunset with a Clysdale. What would the game be without our favorite steed?

True confession: Claude wrote the first draft of this article! He’s my new prolific AI boyfriend. But we’re not exclusive. And, as my favorite Super Bowl spots told us, he’s ad-free! Claude versus ChatGPT is the new Coke versus Pepsi, as one publication declared.

I’m still struggling with prompting AI not to give me Botox and provocative moves.

If you want to get some AI practice in yourself before the 2027 game and learn more about the ads themselves, simply prompt Claude (or whoever/whatever bot you love) with:

“Please compile a VERIFIED list of all the 2026 Super Bowl advertisers, with a little bit about the ads, a link to them online, and one or two highlights about each, including how they may have integrated the ad with other media.”

Follow me on Substack for more practical AI perspectives and tips.

P.S. Speaking of stories, I LOVED Big Bunny’s performance, but I could have done without the multiple crotch grabs. If you don’t agree, you can still love me! And speaking of love: if we need PSAs costing millions of dollars to remind us to treat each other with basic human decency, maybe we should spend less time watching commercials and more time actually being kind. Just a thought from your friendly neighborhood advertising critic.

What were your favorite (or most hated) Super Bowl spots this year? Drop your hot takes in the comments.