Super Bowl Ads for 2022 – The Best and Worse

Super Bowl Sunday is the one day of the year that television viewers look forward to commercials. From the legendary 1984 ad for Apple Macintosh computers to E-Trade babies and Old Spice hunks, some of the most famous commercials of all time have aired during the Super Bowl.

Although viewership has dropped off in recent years, the Super Bowl remains the biggest night of the year for advertisers. To hold our attention this year, the big game leaned hard on star power. Here’s a round-up of the five best commercials, along with one stinker.

General Motors

Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil from Austin Powers lore isn’t so evil compared to the looming threat of climate change. So the villain is taking over GM and leveraging the new Ultium platform behind the Hummer EV and Silverado EV to defeat his environmental nemesis. Sadly, Scott is still left behind.

Samuel Adams

Boston Dynamics has shown over the years how its robots can do backflips, open doors, enforce social distancing rules and perform parkour. Turns out their robot dog, aka Spot, can also fetch a can of Sam Adams beer. Good boy!

Coinbase

The cryptocurrency exchange platform hit the Super Bowl stage with this creative debut ad… and it got people talking. What’s not to like in an inexpensive production that’s able to generate a return on investment immediately. Isn’t that what advertising is all about?

Greenlight

Ty Burrell is definitely not the guy you want to take money advice from. The Modern Family dad makes a series of awful and outrageous purchasing decisions to highlight the importance of financial literacy in his commercial for Greenlight.

Mail Chimp

In another ‘outside the box’ spot, the email marketing platform poked fun at big-budget ads by plugging their small-business initiative. Its #BigGameSmallAds campaign sent live tweets promoting businesses from the Mailchimp Twitter account after each Super Bowl commercial. Genius!

Amazon

Colin Jost and Scarlett Johansson try to get their Amazon Alexa set up for the Super Bowl and discover along the way that Alexa devices aren’t psychic. Thank heavens for that! The clumsy attempt by Amazon to show its interests are aligned with the public while their privacy doesn’t work, given their history of AI knowing more about ourselves than we do.

Whether the product or the spokesperson was the nostalgia piece, celebrities defined the advertising experience of Super Bowl 2022… and the trend shows no signs of slowing. Here’s to next year, when Alexa will be reading your mind for the ads you want to see too! And to see our commercials, head over to Our Work page.