Super Bowl ads no longer sell products. They sell trust, belonging, and moral alignment as corporations replace politics with managed empathy.
During Super Bowl LX, a Rocket Mortgage commercial featured Lady Gaga singing “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” — the theme from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood — over images of people being welcomed into a community. Ring, the doorbell-camera company, aired a spot for a new AI feature that links neighbors’ cameras together to search for lost dogs, framing a mass neighborhood surveillance network as a heartwarming pet-rescue service. The “He Gets Us” campaign — funded by conservative evangelical donors and running its fourth consecutive Super Bowl ad — returned with a spot about the pressures of modern life called “More.”
Fifteen of the 66 commercials that aired during the game featured artificial intelligence. Airtime cost as much as $10 million for thirty seconds — a record. And as NPR summarized the overall effect: advertisers wanted buzz, not controversy. When social issues appeared at all, the messaging was, in their description, “subtle, friendly and welcoming.”
That combination — the record cost, the AI saturation, the careful neutrality, the Mr. Rogers mortgage — is not a symptom of creative bankruptcy. It is the product of a specific economic and political logic that has been building for decades. To understand why Super Bowl ads feel fake, you have to understand what they are actually for.
From Product to Identity
Advertising used to exist to move products. A company made something and needed to sell it. Even the most theatrical ads were tethered to a commodity. Apple’s 1984 spot was dystopian cinema — but it was selling you a computer. The spectacle delivered a product.
That logic weakened as markets saturated. By the time most households already owned a car, a washing machine, a phone, the difference between brands narrowed and utility stabilized. Growth shifted toward finance, services, branding, and platform infrastructure. The center of gravity moved from production toward control.
When products become functionally interchangeable, they cannot be sold on performance alone. Meaning replaces utility. Identity replaces need. Brands stopped asking “why should you buy this?” and began asking “who are you if you buy our product — and who are you if you don’t?” The use value of the commodity recedes. The social and moral positioning of the brand advances.
This is not a new observation, but the Super Bowl makes it unusually legible because the scale compresses everything. Nostalgia usage in Super Bowl ads rose from 28% in 2015 to 54% in 2025. The commodity being sold increasingly is not a product. It is a feeling about the world.
The Governance Question
The drift toward identity advertising intersected with a second shift: the erosion of political institutions as credible sites of response to social grievance.
When people no longer believe that political processes can address the conditions of their lives, grievance does not disappear — it reroutes. Corporations, which respond quickly to reputational pressure, which issue statements and adjust campaigns and issue apologies, began to function as the institutions that appeared most responsive. Not because they had structural power to change anything, but because they had an incentive to perform responsiveness.
The legal infrastructure supported this. Courts increasingly treated corporate political spending as protected speech. Media consolidation compressed the communicative infrastructure into fewer hands. And the Super Bowl — one of the last synchronized mass-attention events in a hyper-fragmented media landscape — became something other than an advertising broadcast. It became a place where institutions spoke to a nation about who held communicative authority.
When a corporation speaks during that broadcast, it is not simply marketing a product. It is intervening in the emotional architecture of public life at scale.
The structural history of how the Super Bowl became that site — how the event was assembled into infrastructure for capital and state legitimacy rather than simply entertainment — is examined in the analysis of the Super Bowl as ritual of American decline.
Platform Feudalism
The third layer of the transformation involves the structural position corporations now occupy relative to everyday life.
You do not own the digital terrain on which you work, socialize, and speak. You rent access to it. You agree to terms of service rather than negotiate them. Your visibility is mediated by algorithms you do not govern. Where feudalism tied peasants to land they did not own, the modern consumer is tied to platforms they do not control — and the terms of access are set by the platform lord, not the tenant.
Sovereignty under these conditions no longer justifies itself through bloodline or divine right. It justifies itself through brand trust, moral alignment, celebrity aura, and cultural positioning. Athletes, entertainers, and influencers function as the new nobility, lending legitimacy to corporate power. The extraction remains. It is wrapped in empathy.
When inequality intensifies and institutional trust collapses, corporations face a new question. It is no longer simply “what should we sell?” It becomes “why should we be allowed to govern this terrain at all?” The Super Bowl ad answers that question indirectly. The ads do not defend supply chains or labor practices. They do not address structural power. They wrap themselves in the universal language of unity, safety, healing, and belonging. Personal and collective crisis is reframed as interpersonal misalignment. Structural contradiction becomes bad vibes. Exploitation becomes misunderstanding. Power becomes mood.
This is not traditional propaganda issuing top-down commands. It is more elaborate than that. It defines the emotional boundaries of acceptable politics. It signals what anger feels excessive, what dissent feels impolite, what critique feels extreme. It narrows the range of acceptable response to crisis — and because corporate expression is legally protected as speech, this intervention is shielded as neutrality rather than recognized as concentrated power shaping public perception.
The same mechanism — empire consolidating through inclusion rather than suppression, tolerating visibility while ensuring it cannot become autonomy — was visible in the halftime show itself, examined in the analysis of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show and empire’s new strategy.
What the Ads Actually Say
The Ring surveillance ad is the clearest example from Super Bowl LX. The product — a network of cameras linking neighbors’ homes for AI-assisted monitoring — carries serious implications in a political moment defined by mass deportation raids and federal surveillance expansion. The ad resolves those implications into a story about finding a lost dog. The thing being sold is not the camera. It is the reassurance that the camera is benevolent.
The Rocket Mortgage ad with Lady Gaga singing “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” performs a different function. It colonizes the emotional vocabulary of a beloved children’s program — community, welcome, neighborliness — and attaches it to a mortgage product. The feeling being sold is not homeownership. It is belonging. The fact that the United States is experiencing one of the worst housing affordability crises in its history while a mortgage company buys sixty seconds of the most expensive broadcast time in media to sell you warmth about neighbors is not ironic. It is the mechanism working exactly as designed.
The “He Gets Us” campaign — funded by conservative donors associated with Hobby Lobby’s owners and running for its fourth consecutive Super Bowl — presents Christian identity as a response to social atomization and pressure. The ad called “More” focuses on the exhaustion of modern life’s constant demands. The solution it implies is not structural. It is spiritual alignment. The crisis is real. The response depoliticizes it.
Across all three, the pattern is identical: a genuine social condition is identified, then resolved into something that demands nothing from the institution doing the addressing.
The Legitimacy Machine
Shareholder primacy makes this structurally inevitable. If a corporation’s stock value depends on brand trust and brand trust depends on moral alignment, ideological positioning becomes fiduciary strategy. Reputation management becomes a form of governance. The Super Bowl ad is not selling soda or insurance or a surveillance camera. It is maintaining the sovereign legitimacy of an institution that needs to justify its place in public life.
The harm is individualized and the accountability is dissolved. Symbolic gestures of progress replace structural accountability. The audience is invited to feel aligned with goodness without confronting actual power. Thirty seconds of practiced empathy substitutes for social transformation.
The sports-specific version of that substitution — emotional release through sponsored spectacle replacing material intervention — is examined in the analysis of Stand Up to Cancer as sponsored spectacle, which documents how charity rituals channel dissatisfaction into market-driven compassion rather than structural challenge.
This is why these ads feel fake. Not because the agencies have run out of ideas. Because they are not trying to sell you something tangible. They are trying to stabilize a system that can no longer justify itself through material improvement — in a moment where citizenship feels hollow, where subscription feels binding, and where trust has become the most valuable commodity on the board.
The problem, as the broadcast itself makes legible, is that trust cannot be manufactured at scale. It does not respond to focus groups or rebranding cycles. The more aggressively it is packaged and sold, the more it reveals the absence it was designed to conceal.
There is nothing left to sell you except the idea that there is.