the ads featured in this year’s Super Bowl mostly touch on safe subjects we traditionally expect in Big Game commercials: Nostalgia. Comedy. Celebrities. Patriotism.

A screenshot from Häagen-Dazs’ first Super Bowl commercial ‘Not so fast, not so furious” featuring Michelle Rodriguez (left), Vin Diesel (right) and Ludacris (not shown) reprising their roles from the Fast & Furious franchise. (Screenshot from Häagen-Dazs ad)

In an unsettled time, the most effective commercial messages are all about reassurance, togetherness and entertainment.

So that may help explain why – at a time when every fresh news alert seems to deliver a new seismic jolt about the world – the ads featured in this year’s Super Bowl mostly touch on safe subjects we traditionally expect in Big Game commercials: Nostalgia. Comedy. Celebrities. Patriotism. And poignant humanism.

“Those ads that really respond to human connection and humanness are going to rise to the top,” says Abigail Posner, director of Google’s U.S. Creative Works, who tracks how clips of Super Bowl ads perform on YouTube and are featured on the streaming service’s YouTube AdBlitz hub.

“Because we’re in a moment of great challenges and unknowns, and also with the influx of technology, there’s that fear,” Posner adds. “So when we go back to what we are all about, we’re about love, we’re about family. We’re about challenging ourselves…I think that always touches us.”

With ad space topping out at $8 million per 30 seconds for time in a broadcast that was the most-watched single telecast on U.S. TV last year, Super Bowl ads are also a gigantic business aimed at boosting the biggest companies, films, celebrities and products on the planet.

Which means this year, there’s lots of ads designed to put a human, down-to-earth face on major technology products (Google Pixel’s Gemini A.I.), pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer and Novartis), fast food conglomerates (Little Caesars and Doritos) and even gambling (Bet MGM and Fanduel).

It also seemed that many more ad campaigns rolled out their spots in advance, counting on an advance media push. And in a cultural moment when some have disdained socially conscious terms like “woke” and the NFL removed the lettering “end racism” from the field’s end zones, it makes a certain kind of disappointing sense that advertisers have toned down the messaging. Instead, they’ve dialed up the slapstick humor and absurdist situations, while dialing back earnest takes about turbulent social issues.

With all that in mind – and noting some analyses are based on advanced versions of ads released before the game started – here’s the 2025 edition of my look at what worked and what flopped on the biggest advertising showcase in modern media.

Best use of a celebrity conspiracy theory: Uber Eats “A Century of Cravings.”

It’s always entertaining to watch a famous face embrace their reputation for being crazy. So this ad, which positions Matthew McConaughey as a Mad Men-type NFL executive insisting football is just a “conspiracy to make us hungry” – then playing all these people through the past century who made it happen, including Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka – offers just the right kind of absurdist crazy that makes a Super Bowl ad pop. Toss in cameos from Kevin Bacon, Martha Stewart, Hot Ones host Sean Evans – eating wings, of course – and Barbie director Greta Gerwig and you wind up with an ad that entertains, whether you’re a tinfoil hat-wearing member of the online broligarchy or someone who just likes laughing at them.

Best use of a self-deprecating celebrity, Part 2: Dunkin’s “The Bean Method.”

Will people who don’t follow show business know that Succession star Jeremy Strong has a well-publicized devotion for using incredibly extreme methods to research the characters he plays? Tough to know. But this TV nerd certainly loved seeing him rise from a vat of steaming coffee grounds to tell Ben and Casey Affleck, “I’m just trying to find the character” in their ad for Boston-based Dunkin (the spot which aired during the Big Game also featured a mostly mute former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, playing to type). It might be tough for all three actors to star in an ad playing off the idea that average people see them as dimwitted, overly confident goofballs. But I’m sure the paycheck and status of headlining a talked-about Big Game ad will soothe their existential pain.