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Every year, Super Bowl advertisers pay millions to appear on screens for a minute or less. The ad slots tend more toward the upbeat than the controversial. But even by the low bar of Super Bowl advertising, this year was rather risk-averse. Sweet animals and mascots abounded. Multiple ads featured vaguely old-timey montages. At a certain point, the commercials started to blend together. (The two different ads featuring flying hair certainly did.)

In past big games, some companies have attempted to speak to the zeitgeist by addressing civic or political themes in their ads. In 2017, just after Donald Trump was inaugurated for the first time, some major Super Bowl advertisers addressed politics head-on: Budweiser released an ad portraying the founder of the company encountering discrimination as he immigrated to America. Airbnb’s spot that year seemingly criticized Trump’s then–travel ban.

In the past decade or so, in particular, some brands have embraced explicitly political marketing, giving credence to the idea that consumers “vote with their wallets.” Some shoppers have said that they do: A 2018 survey from the communications firm Edelman found that nearly 60 percent of American consumers would buy or boycott a brand “solely because of its position on a social or political issue,” up 12 points from the year before. Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, many consumers (and employees) demanded that major corporations, even those whose businesses didn’t directly relate to social issues, take a stand on topics such as race, voting rights, and abortion—even if some suspected that companies were responding to pressure rather than acting on genuine principle.

This year’s Super Bowl advertisers showed little interest in going near any of that. Few made explicit reference to politics (excepting nonprofits). Timothy Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern, told me that he sees the 2023 Bud Light imbroglio, in which the company faced massive backlash over partnering with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social-media video, as a shift. By 2023, Americans had started to soften on their interest in companies taking a stand on social issues, according to Gallup. Flickers of a move away from political ads were apparent last year; during both the 2023 and the 2024 games, Budweiser made a nostalgia play, focusing its ads on the brand’s classic Clydesdale horses.

The NFL, for its part, decided this year to remove the message “End Racism,” which had been stenciled onto the edge of the end zone for the past four Super Bowls, and replace it with “Choose Love.” Donald Trump attended the game, the first sitting president to do so; the league has denied that the timing of the change was related to the president’s attendance.

Super Bowl ad space was available for purchase well before the presidential election: Skechers, back in May, became the first brand to confirm that it had bought a national spot. By mid-2024, about 85 percent of the ad units were sold out, and by early November, all of the slots had sold. A bit of reshuffling followed—State Farm pulled its ad after the Los Angeles–area fires—but for the most part, companies have been prepping for many months. Still, Calkins told me, every advertiser likely took a closer look at their cuts after the election, to make sure that nothing would spark too much controversy, given the new administration.

Super Bowl ads cost so much—more than $8 million this year for some national slots, nearly double what they cost a decade ago—and a misstep can pose a dire risk for companies. But many still find the huge audience, a rarity in our fractured media environment, worth the potential treachery, Calkins told me. The challenge for brands going forward, he said, is to find the balance of being “safe” without losing creativity. This year, lots of ads were uncontroversial—and uninspired. Maybe next year, more of them will surprise us.

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Evening Read

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What Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Said

By Spencer Kornhaber

The Super Bowl halftime show is an opportunity for big, dumb fun: explosions, laser shows, left sharks. But big, dumb fun isn’t Kendrick Lamar’s thing. The 37-year-old Los Angeles rapper and Pulitzer Prize winner prefers subtlety, smarts, and fun that’s tinged with danger and unease. Amid tough, tense circumstances, he put on a tough, tense—and quite satisfying—show.

Read the full article.

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The Super Bowl halftime show is an opportunity for big, dumb fun: explosions, laser shows, left sharks. But big, dumb fun isn’t Kendrick Lamar’s thing. The 37-year-old Los Angeles rapper and Pulitzer Prize winner prefers subtlety, smarts, and fun that’s tinged with danger and unease. Amid tough, tense circumstances, he put on a tough, tense—and quite satisfying—show.

The event framed itself in self-conscious terms. “This is the great American game,” Samuel L. Jackson, dressed as Uncle Sam, announced at the start. He probably wasn’t just referring to football. Lamar himself was about to run a familiar artistic gantlet: the struggle to keep one’s integrity intact while entertaining the masses. The stage was set up in a tic-tac-toe design, and Jackson popped up at various times to score the proceedings. Lamar rapped with intense focus, nailing every bit of elegantly herky-jerky choreography. But his face also conveyed anxiety, even fear. We knew that he knew he was being watched.

One of the people watching was Donald Trump, in attendance in New Orleans on a brief break from upending the federal government. Lamar is widely seen as the social conscience of his generation of rappers, and he knew he was expected to make a statement of some sort. “The revolution’s about to be televised,” Lamar announced early on. But he added, “You picked the right time but the wrong guy.” One possible meaning: I’m not your revolutionary. It’s the same message he’s repeatedly conveyed on his albums over the years, replying to onlookers who want him to be more of a messiah than a musician.

Even so, he flirted with politics during the performance. Lamar rapped from the hood of a Buick GNX—the car that he, on his latest album, has held up as a symbolic trophy of his struggle to survive the violence and poverty he was raised amid in gangland Compton. His dancers’ red, white, and blue outfits evoked Crips and Bloods, which made it a bit stunning when they lined up to form an American flag, and raised their fists in what looked like the Black Power salute. Here was a vision of American pride from a group often locked out of the American dream. But also, here was a rapper playing that “great American game,” provoking while staying patriotic.

(A sharper bit of messaging was spelled out when one of Lamar’s dancers unfurled a flag representing Gaza and Sudan. The performer was tackled by security; “No one involved with the production was aware of the individual’s intent,” the NFL said in a statement afterward.)

Arguably the bigger risk Lamar took was in egging on his feud with Drake, which has embroiled the hip-hop world for nearly a year. Lamar has been riding a wave of acclaim for his diss track “Not Like Us,” which catchily claims that Drake is a pedophile. Drake has denied the song’s allegations and sued Universal Music Group, the label that the two rappers share, for promoting defamatory material. Lamar’s song won Song of the Year and Record of the Year at last week’s Grammys, but even so, it seemed possible that his own lawyers would forbid him from playing the song on live TV.

[Read: The hip-hop halftime show was an overdue triumph]

Lamar made a meal out of this suspense. “I want to perform their favorite song, but you know they love to sue,” he said midway through the set before a snippet of the track’s beat played. When he finally launched into the full song, he scooted forward onstage as the camera moved backwards, as if he were stalking prey just behind the lens. When Lamar finally said Drake’s name, he cocked his head and gave one of his only smiles of the night: a devious, cartoon-villain grin.

This was the moment that the halftime show went from studious art piece to hall-of-fame-worthy TV. The arena hooted for the song’s nastiest punch line alleging underage predilections: “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor.” Serena Williams, the tennis legend who happens to be one of Drake’s exes, made a surprise appearance, clearly having a blast. In this rap battle, Lamar has styled himself as a force for good, a protector of hip-hop’s authenticity. But as the halftime show reached its full, delirious peak, the weight of righteousness seemed to melt away—leaving, simply, a great entertainer.