Super Bowl 60: When Ads Start to Feel Like Sequels

Super Bowl advertising used to be the industry’s wildest creative playground, the place where original human storytelling thrived. It was where brands took risks, built new characters, and created cultural moments that couldn’t have come from anywhere else. But coming out of Super Bowl 60, the vibe feels… different. And not in a “new era of creativity” way. More like déjà vu, a lineup that leans so heavily on A‑listers and familiar tropes that the ads themselves feel like sequels.

This year’s commercial landscape echoed the trajectory of modern Hollywood: less experimentation, more reliance on recognizable faces and pre‑sold audiences. Instead of building something new, many brands opted to borrow equity from celebrities in the same way studios bank on existing IP, comforting, predictable, and risk‑averse. It’s a shift that raises an important question: when did we start trading original human storytelling for the safety of star‑powered nostalgia?

Brands didn’t just sprinkle in star power, they built entire ads around it. More than ever, the celebrity cameo wasn’t a supporting feature, but the creative concept itself.

Consider the roster:

Dozens of ads this year used celebrities as the primary hook, leaning on borrowed equity, preexisting fan bases, and Insta‑ready familiarity. It mirrors Hollywood’s modern formula: safer bets over original stories.

And it’s not hard to see why. With ad slots hitting $8–10 million for :30 seconds, and top celebrity talent $3–5 million on top of that, brands aren’t paying for risk, they’re paying for guarantees. [nflplayoffpass.com]

But in this sea of star‑powered sameness, another trend emerged, one that could actually reshape the industry’s creative model.

This year wasn’t just celebrity‑heavy. It was AI‑heavy too, and not just thematically. Brands used AI on both sides of the camera, as subject and creator.

Svedka delivered what it called the first primarily AI‑generated national Super Bowl ad, “Shake Your Bots Off,” featuring its robot mascots Fembot and Brobot. AI handled motion, facial expression mimicry, animation, and iterative creative development. The process took months of AI training and reconstruction, partnering with AI studio Silverside. [techcrunch.com]

It wasn’t just a storyline about AI. The ad was AI.

Anthropic used its Super Bowl debut to position Claude as the “anti‑ad AI,” mocking OpenAI’s monetization strategy with the tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” Rather than a cinematic spectacle, the spot was a brand positioning salvo, an AI company using the world's biggest advertising stage to critique the AI advertising landscape itself. [techcrunch.com]

Artlist.io produced a completely AI-generated commercial in just five days, costing only a few thousand dollars, a fraction of the traditional Super Bowl production budget. This wasn’t just a tech stunt; it demonstrated a real economic alternative to the $2–5M standard production cost range. [cnbc.com]

Even brands not using AI for production leaned into AI as a consumer message:

Super Bowl 60 wasn’t just using AI as a gimmick, it was using the stage to normalize AI as part of everyday life.

Super Bowl 60 was split between ads starring people we already know, and ads powered by technology we’re still getting to know.

Both trends reveal a creative ecosystem increasingly driven by predictability and optimization.

Celebrity‑driven ads promise guaranteed attention. AI‑generated ads promise efficiency, speed, and scale.

The casualty in the middle? Original human storytelling.

At Carbon, we think this moment is the inflection point. With production costs rising and the stakes higher than ever, brands are defaulting to the safest bets, familiar faces and algorithm‑friendly narratives. Meanwhile, AI offers a cost‑effective path to producing high‑volume creative variations, but risks flattening the creative curve into sameness.

The industry is beginning to look like the modern movie business:

But the brands that cut through in 2026 weren’t the ones with the biggest stars or the shiniest tech, they were the ones with a clear point of view.

Lay’s landed with emotional storytelling. Redfin and Rocket Mortgage resonated through community. Liquid I.V. stood out by being genuinely weird and original. [cbssports.com]

And a few brands proved that levity still has power when it’s grounded in a strong idea:

These brands used levity purposefully — not as a distraction, but as a storytelling device that made their message feel human, distinct, and memorable.

In a cluttered, expensive, A‑list‑heavy landscape, originality is suddenly the most disruptive play again.

Super Bowl 60 shows us where advertising is heading: Toward guaranteed attention, optimized production, and a widening gap between spectacle and story.

But it also shows us what still works. Instead of relying on punchy slogans alone, the work that truly resonates is rooted in rigorous research, genuine human insight, data‑driven strategy, and storytelling that reflects how people actually think, feel, and behave, the foundation of Carbon’s approach to building creative that cuts through.

At Carbon, that’s where we’ll keep our focus, not on the sequels, but on the originals.