Celebrity cameos are in their flop era

Getting into what worked and didn’t with this year’s Super Bowl ads

Author

Cameron Huppertz
February 16, 2024

Let’s Talk About the Commercials 

I had my laptop out on Sunday to take notes on the different Super Bowl ads. I’d fully planned on doing a recap of my favorites. I was ready to highlight themes that showed up across the creative. Unfortunately, most of them weren’t that interesting, and there really only seemed to be one theme worth discussing: the overuse of celebrity. 

The vast majority of the spots on Sunday night felt like little more than opportunities for brands to remind us that they can afford to get random famous people to show up to set for a day or two. Some worked better than others. I’m a sucker for the level of commitment to a stupid joke that CeraVe put into their Michael Cera spot. Verizon won the evening by successfully tying their connectivity to one of the largest pop culture moments of the game: Beyonce’s new singles and album announcement. But most of the ads, even from brands or celebs I like, felt rushed, soulless, and disconnected from any kind of brand message or value prop. Celebrity cameos are in their flop era. 

It’s tempting to look at one of the few remaining events in American culture that acts anything like pre-internet monoculture and try to apply monoculture tactics to advertising there. Pair a big moment with a broad audience and a big celebrity with broad name recognition, put the celeb in a tracksuit with your logo all over it, and boom, you’ve got people talking at the water cooler. But even if the Super Bowl still draws in the big, broad audience needed to make that playbook work, that audience has a totally different pattern for engaging with culture every other day of the year.  

There are fewer water coolers in a world of hybrid and remote work. Niche fashion trends bubble up from a wide range of interconnected online communities making it difficult to style a celeb as universally cool or universally ironically uncool. Many of us have strong parasocial connections to online creators like podcast hosts and YouTubers with smaller dedicated audiences. It’s hard to feel connected to the household name class of celebrities as many of them retreat into the detached gloss of carefully managed PR and social media strategies. Even the reason for this year’s Super Bowl rantings blowout is a collection of different audience motivations: sports fans, swifties, and marketing nerds like myself, all tuning in with a different agenda. 

I doubt celebrity-driven campaigns and ad spots are going away any time soon, but I hope there’s an influx of some much needed creativity going forward. Why this celebrity? For this brand? At this moment in time? For this audience? These are basic questions I don’t think enough advertisers asked themselves when building 2024’s Super Bowl commercials. 

Platform Updates

Instagram & Threads

The Rest of Meta 

TikTok

YouTube

Pinterest (disclosure: I’m currently working as a contractor with Pinterest) 

Twitter, Sorry X

The Product 

The Dumpster Fire

Twitter Alts 

Theme Park YouTube

I love theme park videos on YouTube. I’m not even a big theme park attendee, but there’s something about the bizarre mix of business and entertainment in behind-the-scenes theme park stories that will suck me in every time. One of my favorite channels is Defunctland. Instead of playing the posting frequency algorithm game, Defunctland’s focused on producing longer, well-researched, deep-dive videos on a “when they are ready” schedule. My ideal kind of YouTube content TBH. 

Anyway, they have a new video out this week about the American Idol attraction at Disney World, and it’s a great watch. 

Oh, I know what I said about not really going to parks myself earlier, but I will be at Universal Studios Hollywood this weekend. So maybe I’ll have some fun theme park stories and insights of my own for you next week. 

Culture Movers 

Film & TV

Labor

Gaming 

AI 

Threads & Politics

So Instagram has made it pretty clear they don’t want Threads to be your home for political conversation. I’ve got a lot of complicated feelings on this and no real answers, so I’m just going to dump the stray thoughts here for all of us to keep in mind as the platform evolves and this election year plays out. 

Staying informed and engaged with political news is a good thing. I survived 2016-2020 on Twitter, where it felt like politics was a completely unavoidable and everpresent part of digital life. I don’t think we all need that 24/7 firehose of political information again. But being a responsible citizen does mean staying up to date with major news stories and understanding what role the government and politics can play in responding to them. Staying informed and consuming information from a variety of sources is good for us individually and for our democracy. 

Social media is not the ideal vehicle for staying informed on politics. Algorithms designed to make you respond emotionally and/or buy things are not the best filter for which stories are actually important. Platform trends are too easy to hack, giving bad actors opportunities to sway the perception of an issue. Most people you follow aren’t even close to informed experts on the issues that matter. Trying to get all your news from social is like eating gravel and wondering why you’re sick. So maybe a platform downranking politics in their feeds is actually a responsible move.

I don’t trust Meta’s definition of politics. I follow a lot of queer artists, some who make SFW art, some NSFW, and some both. The inconsistency of Meta’s rules around what is and isn’t too sexy for their platforms is a constant source of frustration for all of them. I can’t imagine Threads magically has developed a perfectly fair tool for identifying political posts when Instagram can’t consistently identify which images break their other rules. My worry is that women, people of color, trans folk, and queer other people will disproportionately have their posts labeled as political by this system when simply discussing their lives and everyday experiences. 

PS

*I’m very dyslexic, and this is a largely free project/hobby. I do not set aside the same time for proofreading that I do for other professional work. If you spot a typo that would cause a communication error, please reach out to gently let me know.