Everyone knows that the Super Bowl is rarely just about the game. How can it be when it has a little bit of something for everyone? 

Sure, there are sports. The Chiefs were facing down a possible three-peat, supported by a not-insubstantial amount of Swifties and the blonde supreme leader herself. The Eagles were looking to avenge themselves after Super Bowl LVII, supported by literally everyone else in the United States — led by Jason Kelce and the “Abbott Elementary” cast.

But there’s also the artistic element — each year, the Super Bowl inherits the cultural context of whoever takes the hastily constructed stage in between halves of the game. This year just so happened to take on the generation-defining beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar just a week after “Not Like Us,” Lamar’s diss track about Drake, took home five awards at the Grammys. 

And yet, the biggest beef at the Super Bowl was not between a bootcut-jean-wearing Lamar and a trembling Drake: It was between me and the low-quality commercials during the broadcast.

The Super Bowl’s artistic element is not just the halftime performance but also the commercials. The halftime show itself is only around 13 minutes, but ads take up around 22% of the Super Bowl’s total airtime, making them the second-most prevalent aspect of the broadcast after gameplay. 

This year’s batch of Super Bowl ads were mostly terrible for a slew of reasons. Some were overly emotional; some were overly political. Most prevalently, a raging majority of them were defined by the pursuit of virality or reliance on the fact that they are, in fact, Super Bowl commercials. 

Just because a commercial airs during the Super Bowl doesn’t mean that all pre-existing consumer logic goes out the window. I would like to ask the people at OpenAI a not-so-inquisitive question: Why would I, a viewer, choose to scan a QR code during an ad so that I could then watch more ads?

I’ve got another one for the people at — of all places — Hellmann’s, home of “real mayonnaise”: Why toss Sydney Sweeney into a “When Harry Met Sally” (1989) reunion sketch? I know these companies want views; after all, virality is how commercials enter the cultural lexicon, like puppy monkey baby. 

But virality comes from originality. There’s an art to creating memorable marketing that we as a society are losing because the people who can pay enough to hold the country’s attention for less than a minute — and therefore have a hand in guiding visual pop culture — are attempting to do so based on algorithms.

Sure, I was a little excited when I saw Jake Shane in a Poppi ad. But I was probably one of three people who let some air escape through my nose when Rob from “Love Island USA” showed up in the same ad, overalls and all. Add in Alix Earle on a car hood for some reason, and I was physically unable to care about the commercial because it was clearly a desperate plea for a viral TikTok by levying the 15 minutes-of-fame aura of three viral icons.

If ads couldn’t milk the virality out of social media stars, they took a different route: weird. There were four Tubi ads, all revolving around bizarre “Cowboy Heads” in which every person was born with a hat inside their head. That means there were four times when I considered letting my friends text me the results of the game instead of finishing the broadcast.

This stab at 2014-esque, random-lol humor indicates a decline in trust and awareness between audience and marketer. I can confidently say that most people are smart enough for good, clever writing in a commercial and don’t require shock value to remember a commercial.

Not only were they not funny or engaging, but some of the commercials were also downright uncomfortable. Going from giggling at a DoorDash ad featuring Nate Bargatze to being confused at a “No Reason To Hate” commercial was jarring, to say the least. When Kanye West’s face appeared on the screen, I felt like I was watching Matt Reeves’ “The Batman” (2022) and Paul Dano got a hold of the airwaves.

Several similar commercials isolated entire demographics of the broadcast’s viewership by playing to specific identities as if they were commodities to be advertised. Beyond overly emotional and religious ads, promoting products like Hims & Hers’ new weight loss drug perpetuates homogenous social standards for what the average Super Bowl viewer should value.

Despite making up around a fifth of the Super Bowl’s screen time, this year’s ads felt like simultaneously cheap yet gaudily expensive indicators of who had enough money to buy a slot. If you’re going to subject me to non-stop ads when I’m only watching to see whether or not Kendrick Lamar is lowering Drake over a tank of sharks like it’s “Save the Citizen” in “Sky High” (2005), at least make them good!

Anna Jordan is a sophomore writing about pop culture controversies in her column, “Chronically Online,” which runs every other Thursday. She is also a chief copy editor at the Daily Trojan.