What the Super Bowl Revealed About America Right Now

On identity, stimulation, and the ads that accidentally told the truth

The most honest moment of Super Bowl LX didn’t come from a commercial.

It came at halftime.

Bad Bunny stepped onto the biggest stage in American entertainment and didn’t translate himself. Spanish lyrics. Latin rhythms. Cultural specificity without explanation or apology. The performance wasn’t framed as crossover or novelty. It was presented as presence.

The reaction was immediate and telling. Celebration, discomfort, backlash, and thinly veiled resentment all surfaced at once. That response said more about the country than the show itself ever could.

Bad Bunny’s halftime wasn’t just a performance. It was a stress test. When culture shows up without asking permission, it forces people to reveal what they actually believe about inclusion, ownership, and who America is built for.

That tension is the context the rest of the night needs to be understood in.

Because the commercials that followed, taken together, told a surprisingly clear story about how people are living right now and what they’re relying on to get through it.

Three forces dominated the broadcast: artificial intelligence, gambling, and stimulation. Tools to optimize life, risk to feel something, and caffeine to sustain the pace. Not dreams or ideals, but infrastructure.

The Super Bowl didn’t sell aspiration this year. It sold survival systems.

The most surprising thing about the ad slate was that the most emotionally legible work came from the category people tend to fear the most.

The AI companies.

Claude’s spot stood out because it didn’t try to entertain its way into relevance. It was calm, grounded, and quietly firm about where advertising belongs in the AI ecosystem and where it doesn’t. Privacy and user boundaries weren’t treated as footnotes. They were the point.

The ad trusted the audience to sit with an idea instead of rushing them toward a punchline. It raised a question rather than offering reassurance: if this technology is going to live inside your thinking, what kind of relationship do you want with it?

OpenAI approached the moment differently. Codex was positioned as a tool for builders, emphasizing usefulness over philosophy. Creation as identity. Productivity as empowerment. Less about what AI means, more about what it enables.

Together, the AI ads revealed something important. These companies are no longer marketing like consumer tech brands. They’re marketing like institutions. Trust, restraint, and emotional alignment are now part of the product. In a year where so many ads felt empty, these felt considered.

That contrast became sharper when placed next to much of the rest of the slate.

Too many legacy brands fell into a familiar pattern: high spend, recognizable faces, polished execution, and nothing emotionally at stake. State Farm is a clean example. The commercial was expensive and technically sound, but hollow. Awareness without attachment. Presence without meaning.

This is the dead zone a lot of advertising lives in right now. Brands are afraid of alienating anyone, so they avoid saying anything real. The result is work that fills space but doesn’t move people.

Where things got more interesting was around stimulation.

Liquid Death and Dunkin, taken together, felt like two sides of the same cultural coin. Liquid Death continues to operate with a clear sense of itself, expanding into energy drinks without breaking tone or trust. It understands that it’s not selling beverages so much as an attitude toward consumption.

Dunkin, meanwhile, leaned fully into spectacle and nostalgia. Celebrity cameos, heavy CGI, and familiar faces weren’t about storytelling as much as signaling ubiquity. Dunkin wasn’t selling coffee as ritual or taste. It was selling fuel. Participation. Permission to keep going.

Placed alongside the rise of sports betting ads and the dominance of AI, the message was hard to miss. This was a broadcast built around stimulation. Technology to increase output. Gambling to spike dopamine. Caffeine to sustain the grind. The Super Bowl didn’t just reflect culture. It reflected coping mechanisms.

Crypto sat awkwardly within that landscape.

Coinbase’s spot was restrained and straightforward, but the online reaction revealed a category still negotiating its past. The creative wasn’t the issue. The skepticism was already there. Crypto no longer carries inevitability. It carries memory.

You can’t advertise your way out of trust debt. You have to build your way out.

Ring’s commercial touched a different nerve. Framed as safety, it activated anxiety around surveillance and control. In the current climate, that tension is impossible to separate from the product itself. Technology that watches will always provoke discomfort, no matter how clean the branding.

Another quiet issue hovered over the entire night. Too many of these commercials had already been seen. Released early in the name of engagement, they arrived on Super Bowl Sunday stripped of surprise. What used to be a shared reveal now feels like a recap for anyone who spends time online.

Scarcity was always the magic. Without it, even good work struggles to land.

Taken as a whole, Super Bowl LX revealed a strange inversion. The AI ads felt thoughtful and human. Many legacy brands felt automated. Stimulation dominated the conversation, not because it was exciting, but because it’s essential to how people are functioning.

And then there was Bad Bunny, returning us to the central truth of the night.

His performance wasn’t designed to soothe or explain. It asserted presence without compromise. The backlash that followed wasn’t a distraction from the moment. It was proof of it.

The Super Bowl still works as a mirror. This year it reflected a country negotiating identity, leaning on stimulation, and becoming visibly uncomfortable when culture shows up without asking permission.

That discomfort is the most honest signal the night produced.