The 1984 Problem.

The death of advertising courage and the $400 million surrender.

On Sunday night, approximately 130 million people watched roughly 70 commercials during Super Bowl LX. At $8 to $10 million per 30-second slot—not counting production budgets that routinely hit $10 million and celebrity fees in the mid-seven figures—American brands collectively wagered somewhere north of $400 million on a single evening of advertising.

And what did they buy? Singing toilets. Sabrina Carpenter making out with a Pringles man. Kendall Jenner betting on her exes. A parade of A-listers sleepwalking through concepts so thin they’d blow away in a light breeze.

This isn’t advertising.

This is an industry conducting an expensive autopsy on itself.

To every brand that opted to spend millions to appear last night, where is your judgment? You have been taken for a colossal ride, one you apparently never saw coming. Someone once said there are no bad ideas. That’s like saying there are no other intelligent life forms in the universe. There are bad ideas everywhere, and a good many of them showed up last night. The worst part? You funded them.

Yes, you got your name in front of millions. To what end? The tripe you enabled is already in the dustbin of history. By Wednesday, no one will remember whether it was Hellmann’s or Heinz that had Andy Samberg, or whether the cracker commercial was for Ritz or Wheat Thins. The forgettable has become the standard.

Forty-two years ago, Apple spent roughly $500,000 to produce a 60-second spot directed by Ridley Scott. The board hated it. They didn’t understand it. It didn’t show the product. It confused their left brains. Steve Jobs loved it. Chiat/Day had to resort to subterfuge to even get it aired, deliberately failing to sell back the time slot when ordered to do so. The Apple board hated “1984” because it didn’t show the computer. It didn’t demonstrate what the product did. But it did something far more valuable. It declared what Apple believed.

Last night, by contrast, we got Jon Hamm and Scarlett Johansson stranded on “Ritz Island,” a premise so vacuous it could have been generated by committee in eleven minutes. We got William Shatner making bowel movement jokes for Raisin Bran. We got an AI-generated vodka commercial that looked like a fever dream designed by an algorithm that had never actually experienced human pleasure.

There are three parties responsible for what we witnessed last night: brands, agencies, and the approval structures that connect them. All three have failed.

Brands have become so terrified of controversy that they’ve settled for irrelevance. They have confused “not offending anyone” with “mattering to someone.” They have optimized for safety when safety, in advertising, is the most dangerous strategy of all. Spending $15-50 million to be forgettable isn’t conservative. It’s catastrophic.

Agencies have either lost the ability to recognize greatness or lost the courage to fight for it. Every spot that aired last night went through layers of creative review. Strategists blessed it. Creative directors signed off. Account leads presented it with enthusiasm. And what emerged was a sea of celebrity cameos strung together with the thinnest possible creative thread. The industry has become an assembly line for adequacy.

The approval process itself has calcified into a machine designed to eliminate anything interesting. By the time a concept survives the gauntlet of research, revision, legal review, and executive approval, all the edges have been sanded off. What remains is smooth, safe, and pointless.

The tragedy is that everyone in this system knows better. CMOs didn’t get to their positions by being stupid. Neither did ECDs. They know what good work looks like. They’ve seen it. Some of them have even made it. But somewhere between knowing and doing, the courage evaporates.

In the middle of this creative wasteland, Anthropic aired its first Super Bowl campaign with a simple provocation: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”

Anthropic’s campaign, created by Mother and directed by Jeff Low, imagined a near-future where AI conversations are constantly hijacked by irrelevant, intrusive ads. Each spot showed a human moment interrupted by a chatbot trying to sell something inappropriate.

I’m not saying it was “1984.” Nothing is “1984.” But it was at least a position, a belief expressed through the work rather than just a celebrity carrying a product.

1984 couldn’t happen today. Not because we lack the talent. We have more creative tools, more production capability, more distribution reach than Lee Clow and Steve Jobs ever dreamed of. It couldn’t happen because we’ve lost the ability to recognize greatness when it’s revealed to us. And something else. The cojones to let greatness, when it does happen, have room to run.

What’s particularly damning is that everyone involved knows this. The creatives know the work is thin. The strategists know the insights are generic. The clients know they’re paying premium prices for commodity ideas. But the system continues because no one wants to be the person who approved the thing that went wrong. Better to approve Sabrina Carpenter kissing a chip mascot than to champion something that might provoke a genuine response.

So what would courage look like now? It would look like a brand taking a position that might alienate some customers. It would look like a campaign that trusts viewers to feel something rather than just recognize a famous face. It would look like creative work that has a point of view, that emerges from actual conviction, that risks being wrong because it’s trying to be right about something that matters. It would look like showing an athlete throwing a hammer through a screen rather than showing twenty celebrities in quick cuts hoping one of them lands. It would look like believing, genuinely, that your product or service represents something worth believing in—and then expressing that belief with conviction rather than defensive irony.

The best work from last night, such as it was, came from the few advertisers willing to commit. Chevy’s ad for its F1 team borrowed JFK’s words and aimed for something larger than a transaction. The “He Gets Us” campaign continued its multi-year effort to reframe religious messaging for contemporary audiences, an effort you can agree or disagree with, but one that clearly stands for something. The Anthropic spots took a clear philosophical position and expressed it without hedging.

Everything else? Celebrity karaoke. A $400 million game of Mad Libs where the blanks are filled with famous names and the sentences mean nothing.

Brands, this is your fault. You gathered in conference rooms and approved these concepts. You saw the storyboards. You attended the shoots. You signed off on the final cuts. At every stage, you had the power to demand more. To send the work back. To insist on something that would actually matter. To be the client who pushes rather than settles.

You didn’t.

And now your spots are already forgotten, your millions already spent, your moment already past. The dustbin of history fills faster every year. By the time next year’s game arrives, few will remember what you did in 2026.

Was it worth it?

The Super Bowl should be advertising’s Olympics. The venue where the best in the world show what the form can achieve. Instead, it’s become a very expensive parade of anxiety, brands paying premium prices to demonstrate that they have nothing to say.

Creatively, we are in trouble. Not because the talent has disappeared, but because the systems that should champion that talent have been captured by fear.

“Keep thinking,” the Claude ads said.

It’s advice the industry might consider taking.

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