Dear Dad,
Advertisements for Sunday’s Super Bowl cost the companies nearly $8 million per 30 seconds. What messages could possibly be worth that kind of cash?
We heard from food delivery services, DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instacart. Fast food chains Dunkin, Taco Bell, and Little Caesar’s. From products like Ritz crackers, Doritos, Pringles, Lays Potato Chips, Torino’s Pizza rolls, Haagen-Dazs Ice Cream, Nerds candy, and Reese’s. Beverage producers like Mountain Dew, Poppi, Iced Coffee, Liquid Death, and nearly all Beer companies. Of course pharma wanted in on the spending spree with ads from Pfizer, Novartis, and Hims & Hers.
Of course, I hope, nobody relied on the Super Bowl commercials to draft their shopping lists for this week…but if I know one thing about corporations it’s they are not spending $8 million dollars for 30 second ads to sell less products. Maybe it’s all harmless, and fun gimmicks to promote product awareness (though none were all that funny), but consider the below ad and the message it promoted using the 1933 World Series Champion New York Giants. 1
Made crystal clear with hindsight, when corporate profits are in mind your health is not. With that PSA on the record, here are my superlatives for best, worst, and most manipulative 2025 Super Bowl ads as it related to food.
BEST = Hexclad Cookware, “Unidentified Frying Object”
Why? Promoted cooking at home. Meals cooked at home will be significantly lower in added salt, sugar, and oil, as well as more likely to use real whole foods.
WORST: Hims & Hers: “Sick of the System”
Why? This commercial correctly identified the issue of our declining population health. It even suggested, correctly in my opinion, that many of these issues are due to system failures. However, it then went on to proclaim the savior to the problem was their magic weight-loss pill. No pill will make you healthy and health is far more encompassing than weight.
Most Manipulative: Lays, “The Little Farmer”
Why? This commercial might employ the best techniques of story-telling out of the whole lot, there is heart-break, grit, and triumph. The tale is cute, highlights farmers, and implies the importance of eating real food. The ad ends with the tag line, “real potatoes grown on farms across America… what joy tastes like.”
All good, until you flip a bag of Lays potato chips over and read the actual ingredients and nutrition facts:
Ingredients: Potatoes, Vegetable Oil (Canola, Corn, Soybean, And/Or Sunflower Oil), And Salt.
Nutrition Facts: 160 calories, 10 g of fat, 150 mg sodium, 1g of dietary fiber, and 2 g of sugar, and 2 g protein.
Compared to an actual potato with an ingredient list of “1 potato” and nutrition facts of 110 calories, 0 fat, 0 sodium, 2 g dietary fiber, 1 g of sugar, and 3 g of protein. So the “real farm grown potato chips” have more calories, a 10000% increase in fat, 1500% increase in sodium, half the dietary fiber, twice the sugar, and less protein.
Of course potato chips come from “real potatoes” they just don’t resemble them after being processed, deep fried, salted, packaged, shipped, and placed on store shelves and vending machines. Instead of giving her cared for potato to the truck driver, the sweet little farmer should have baked her whole potato in her country kitchen and really experienced “what joy tastes like!”
Those are my picks. What are yours?
Important disclaimer: I did not see any commercials after 9:15 p.m. because wow was that game boring and I happily turned the TV off to read before be bed.
With Love,
JSR
