Given how many tech products have added unnecessary and undercooked AI features to their services, it’s no surprise that AI was a recurring topic during this year’s Super Bowl ad breaks. What was a bit more surprising, however, was the amount of virtual reality, robots, and, yes, aliens. Especially aliens.
Whether it was born from a feeling of optimism or a feeling of obsolescence, 2025 was the year of the post-human Super Bowl campaign. Extraterrestrials were the focus of at least four ads this year, by this writer’s count. There was, of course, the Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson Totino’s ad that ran the week before the big game. Joining them today was a Doritos ad where an alien tries to abduct a vegging man’s chips, but they end up chilling together. This was honestly pretty charming in an early 2000s ad campaign kind of way. Another clever moment was an ad for Poppi soda, which was immediately followed by an ad reimagining the previous ad as a Tubi original movie featuring alien greasers from space. Earlier, there was a spot for HexClad, which posited Pete Davidson (and all celebrities of a certain level of fame) is an alien. Well, okay!
That’s about it for the fun stuff. Taking a similar—albeit more sinister—tack as the HexClad ad was a Duracell ad that imagined Tom Brady as a robot needing his batteries changed. This was likely intended to be a joke at Brady’s expense, but it didn’t jibe with his other big spot of the night, a vague “stop hate” campaign pairing him with Snoop Dogg. A nice enough idea, directed, unfortunately, at no one in particular. At least we were spared from any kind of DOGE spot.
And then there’s the AI commercials. Most notable was the previously reported full-minute spot for ChatGPT, which presented its service as the next big step in human evolution on par with the inventions of fire and the wheel. (One wonders why those discoveries didn’t require the level of convincing to catch on.) More effective, if not necessarily more comforting, was the Google Pixel with Gemini AI. The premise was simple enough: A father, who apparently had been out of the labor market for some time while caring for his child, was practicing interview responses by positioning his home life skills as professional ones. Putting a toddler down for bed is an example of his negotiation skills, for example. But the “reveal” at the end (at least in the shortened version that actually aired during the game, as this writer can recall) is that he’s bouncing the answers off Gemini, convincing it of his qualifications and confidence. This, of course, works because Gemini is not yet privy to his innermost thoughts and only received what was otherwise a very typical interview response! It’s unclear how this would even be useful as a product, but if the goal was to tug on a football fan’s heartstrings with scenes of raising a child, mission accomplished. And finally, for Salesforce, Matthew McConaughey sat outside in the rain receiving food he didn’t like because he didn’t use the app’s AI agent. He apparently didn’t talk to the waiter bringing him his jumbo shrimp, either, presumably because humans are so passé.
