Arnold Worldwide's CCO Reflects on 2022's Super Bowl Ads

Being an advertiser in 2022 is like being a parent to like 11 kids. It’s hard work, often there’s too much to keep track of, you wear sweat pants all the time and you barely see anyone or do anything cool anymore. And Super Bowl feels like the one night a year advertisers actually get a baby sitter, hit the town and get loose.

As such, I think there’s this impulse to try to jam as much into that one night as possible. To me, a lot of the work felt like it was trying to jam in a full year’s worth of fun and excitement into 30 seconds. Everything had three too many scenes. Everything featured a bloated grab-bag of mismatched celeb cameos. Everything felt like it was shot to be a 1:20 and then edited down to a :30.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that the work felt desperate to surprise and entertain. That’s how we should always approach our work. I just think we need to balance it with simple ideas, simple execution, and great craft.

So, for me, the ones that rose above were the ones that managed to be surprising and exciting without feeling too frenetic. I liked Larry David’s crypto ad, I liked the Joneses, the Pixel ad had a simple, powerful thought. I liked the Irish Spring thing.

But many others that had promise devolved over the 30 seconds. Why was Lindsey Lohan glowing? Why was Jason Sudekis unzipping his face? Why was Seth Rogan marrying a ghost? Promising beginnings that felt unfocused and undisciplined in execution.

Above all, I wish we could agree that humour, relevance, real production budgets and genuine attempts to entertain shouldn’t be a once-a-year occurrence. Maybe if we got out more, we wouldn’t be so damned awkward.