If there’s one thing Super Bowl ads are great for, it’s making tens of millions of people associate mortgages with brilliant comedy.

Rocket Homes and Rocket Mortgage’s ad was rated the crowd favorite for the second straight year in USA Today’s Ad Meter. The financial services firm combined uber-likable stars Anna Kendrick and Barbie with precocious kids and snappy banter one-liners about the housing crisis. 

Even the snark in this ad and others played it safe, with some of the most polarizing ads being those with the lowest production budgets. Those included electric vehicle challenger Polestar, ranked #57 in the Ad Meter rankings, and Coinbase’s site-crashing dancing QR code coming in dead last at #66 despite them giving away millions of dollars in Bitcoin.

Price trends of Super Bowl ads continue to climb due to scarcity of mass media inventory. Despite the high cost of media that’s north of $5M for a :30 spot (and can reach $10M for a :60), it’s further amortized by adapting the creative into video (and still-image assets) across various social platforms, digital video properties, display buys, OOH, and elsewhere. Creative costs, or costs of sweepstakes in Coinbase’s case, make it all the more imperative to maximize returns.

For spots with high production value, including talent costs of bringing on the likes of Idris Elba, Scarlett Johansson, or LeBron James, advertisers tend to shoot a lot of extra takes that can be used as teasers, behind-the-scenes footage, and additional creative to further the story.  

The heaviest categories overall were:

• Auto (almost all EV, plus some car-buying apps and accessories)

• Food & beverage (mostly snack foods)

• Beer (with the biggest push forzero-calorie beers and hard seltzers)

• Tech (mostly a mix of the Triopoly, plus some crypto and sports betting)

• Financial services (a wide range of tax prep, crypto, gambling, mortgages)

• Entertainment (movie trailers from Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix, HBO, Universal)

Some less-presented categories included Wellness (though there was an intriguing spot from women’s health tech company Hologic, and a crowd-pleasing celeb montage from Planet Fitness), Retail (with Walmart’s Sam’s Club being a rare exception as a first-time advertiser in this Kevin Hart-starrer), and Travel (who doesn’t love Idris Elba though?).

In the Travel category, we’re expecting many more ads next year, assuming pandemic restrictions keep easing and the world reopens in a big way. Travel advertisers will likely be much bigger spenders the rest of the year. Given the planning time needed for Super Bowl spots, the category faced a big risk this year given pandemic variability.

The metaverse may feel like it’s everywhere and nowhere, but during the Super Bowl, it was omnipresent. Meta promoted the brand shift from Oculus to Meta Quest with a quirky spot set to “Don’t You Forget about Me” (a curious choice for Meta whose ubiquity makes them a hard brand to forget). Bud Light had a whole metaverse and NFT themed ad to tout what’s “NEXT.” Salesforce referenced it disparagingly, anchoring its brand in the real world, while showing a mass of headset-wearing people in a zombie-like trance.  

Broader web3-related trends were also everywhere, especially with the likes of new crypto advertisers FTX, Israel’s eToro, Crypto.com, and Coinbase.  

As we get closer to consumers finally getting to experience 5G, it was hardly shocking that it popped up in the telecom spots from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Similar to EVs, 5G is one of those themes that will be a constant for years. And soon, you may be able to buy a 5G device that runs on 5G bandwidth and delivers noticeably faster 5G speeds. EV owners didn’t have to wait so long.

After another year of the pandemic – with no end in sight to hyper-partisanship and accusations from both sides of everyone ‘canceling’ everyone else – advertisers clearly aimed at safer tones and worked to appeal to as many as possible. That might have backfired, as 19 of 57 spots (33%) scored a 6.0 or higher in 2021’s Ad Meter, compared to 12 out of 66 this year (18%). Maybe another year of the pandemic made viewers more jaded, but advertisers may need to find their edge again if they want to win over audiences in 2023.