It has always been very strange how it's just kind of normal that people treat Super Bowl advertising as a big spectacle. In almost no other situations do ordinary people discuss advertisements with much other than disinterest or disdain.
People used to go to great efforts to show up to a World's Fair, which is basically all advertising. Same with entertainment or tech expos or keynotes or whatnot.
I think we've kind of binned advertising into this category of "objectively bad manipulation that ideally stops existing." Probably because there is just SO MUCH JUNK ADVERTISING these days. But I think there's legitimate, win-win occasions for advertising where you get to learn about new stuff and be entertained.
I would agree if everyone could just chill and present honest ads. Instead we have Google comparing their hardware against third-world manufacturers, Apple benchmarking their Macbooks against 4-year-old machines and Microsoft claiming performance improvements over Windows 8.
Nobody can tell an honest narrative anymore. It's just different flavors of hustling for different people, who think their taste in advertising is exclusive or developed.
Movie and videogame trailers are advertising, people still look forward to it. CES, E3, and other various industry events are advertising, and people (or their employers) even pay money to attend.
It is less about it being advertising, and more about the medium/how it is done. Those things I listed above are usually high-budget and high-effort. Regular TV ads are the lowest common denominator "bang-per-buck" type of advertising, and no one typically likes those.
Growing up I would always go to my friends house for the superbowl even though I did not care for the sport at all. The ads were always the most entertaining part for me as a kid. Then as I got older, the ads would be talked about at work that week, if you didn't watch them, you couldn't really participate. Of course now we can just stream the top 5, but no one really talks about them irl anymore.
For decades, it was an opportunity for ad agencies to premiere their most ambitious and high-production-value works to an enormous, engaged audience.
While ads are tiresome in general, it's ultimately still an art form that invites some very talented people to contribute to it and benefits from a stupid amount of money. Superbowl ads are as hit and miss as any other short film work and are subject to commercial conceit, but could often become a powerful experience to share with tens of millions of people.
As attention gets more diluted, this becomes an increasingly less ripe opportunity and doesn't warrant quite the same ambition as it used to. But there's nothing "strange" about it historically.
The Super Bowl was for years the single most watched thing on television hands down, so companies paid truck loads of cash to get an ad in front of those people. It then became a thing where the ads were so different in so many ways compared to something during normal programming. It was advertising's annual moon shot.
It would be interesting to know if the ad companies did underground campaigning to get the hype of watching commercials as much as trying to make interesting commercials. You know, pre-algo generated feeds. Now, you can see the ads days/weeks in advance of the game rather than a big secret reveal during the game where you might still miss it.
I think that may have been more accurate 1-2 decades ago, but I don't think the average superbowl ad in the past couple years has earned much attention.
